David Cameron writes in his memoirs that two days in the calendar matter more for a leader of the opposition than all the others. One is the date of the leader’s autumn party conference speech, which gives a rare chance to stand in the televised spotlight and tell the country what you stand for. The other is the spring local elections day, which gives the country the equally rare chance to say if it likes what it sees and hears.
The ghostly strangeness of Keir Starmer’s first year as leader of the Labour party is reflected in the fact that in the 12 months since he succeeded Jeremy Corbyn neither of these two normally crucial opportunities for an opposition politician has come his way. The first lockdown meant that last year’s local elections were postponed, while the continuing of the pandemic meant last year’s party conference season was effectively scrapped too.
The result, a year into the job, is that, thanks to the pandemic and through no fault of his own, Starmer remains an unusually unknown and untested Labour leader. Starmer ruefully observed recently that he is probably the only party leader in modern times who has never shaken a voter’s hand and never made a speech that anyone has applauded. With elections due in almost every part of the country on 6 May, all that is about to change.
Before it does, it is important to recognise that the other 363 days of the first year of Keir have also been pretty weird too. Covid has sucked the life out of conventional politics. This does a huge favour to incumbents – Boris Johnson, Nicola Sturgeon and Mark Drakeford have each been able to dominate the news. Meanwhile, Labour’s own focus groups show the public has no patience during a national emergency for the partisan dogfights that some activists may crave. Nor are the weird times over. The path back to life – and politics – as normal is still far from clear.
This all makes it perilous to try to make decisive verdicts about Starmer’s first year. The polling figures tell a story that is both good and bad for Labour, but certainly not conclusive. They show that between Starmer’s election in April and the autumn Labour successfully closed the voting intention poll gap on the Conservatives to a single point between October and December (on a monthly average of polls), before the gap widened again this year. The March average, which Boris Johnson will hope to take into the local elections, is a seven-point Tory lead: Conservatives 43% to Labour 36%.
Starmer’s own ratings are hard to summarise, not least because the polling companies ask their questions about party leaders in so many different ways. Even so, it is probably no great surprise that in most polls Starmer’s own ratings have followed a broadly similar pattern to Labour’s, improving in the autumn of 2020 and ebbing in the first quarter of 2021. Ipsos Mori currently has Boris Johnson on a satisfied-dissatisfied score of 44%-51% among all voters, with Starmer on 33%-42%.
These patterns are easier to explain than some pretend. Labour’s improvement last year reflected two things: first, that Starmer is not Corbyn, and second, that Johnson (with a significant Dominic Cummings assist) bungled the first phases of the pandemic. Labour’s subsequent decline reflects the palpable success of the vaccination rollout and the readiness of most voters to want the government to succeed in the emergency. A more confident public mood has strengthened the Tories and Johnson. Is that fair? No. Is it true? Yes.
This hardly adds up to the crisis for Starmer that some claim. But it is a reminder of the scale of his challenge. To win an overall majority in the next general election, according to the polling expert Sir John Curtice, Labour needs a swing of about 12% from the Conservatives compared with 2019. The constituency whose capture would nominally take Labour over the line is the south-east London suburb of Bromley and Chislehurst, where the Conservative majority at a general election has never dropped below 9,000 since the seat was created in 1997. In March 2021, and judging by the average of polls, the UK voting intention swing so far achieved by Starmer is under 2.5%, which is not yet enough to deny the Tories a majority, never mind put Labour back in power.
The hole in which Labour currently finds itself is much deeper than in the past. The two most recent Labour leaders Starmer has said he aims to emulate by winning power are Harold Wilson, who became leader in February 1963 when Labour had a 16-point lead in the polls, and Tony Blair, who was elected leader in 1994 when Labour’s lead was 19 points. By contrast, when Corbyn handed over to Starmer a year ago, he bequeathed him a 20-point Labour deficit. As one Labour MP put it this week: “No one else has had to inherit a party that had become a dysfunctional basket case.”
I have spoken to a wide range of senior Labour sources about Starmer’s year in office. Only one said that Starmer was the wrong choice as leader. All the rest supported him. “The instinct for unity is very strong,” says one. That view was echoed widely. “It’s bloody hard if he can’t leave his front room,” says a frontbencher. “He’s a quick learner, but he hasn’t had the opportunity to develop in the job,” says a colleague.
Everyone I spoke to said there were problems to address and policies that needed to be clarified, especially on the economy, and that there was not much time in which to do it. “I think we are still too predictable and unsurprising,” said one MP. “It’s too easy to tune us out. People say they know we have good hearts and support the NHS, but that’s not enough.”
“We have to know where the political jugular is, and go for it,” says another, a former Labour minister. “He strikes me as too much of a civil servant and too little of a politician,” says a third.
Starmer remains in many ways an unknown, perhaps more so than any comparably senior figure in modern politics, even to those around him. The damning verdict that some critics have already made is absurdly premature. It will, though, become much clearer very soon. Starmer may not have been able to cut through amid the dominance of Covid, yet the near invisibility of his first year gives him an unsullied opportunity once politics resumes from this spring. There is a cliche that says you never get a second chance to make a good first impression. But that is exactly what Starmer now has.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
