Abba Voyage, the 21st-century AI reincarnation of the Swedish megastars who ruled the roost from the mid 1970s to early 1980s, is still raking in the visitors, three years after its launch.
Retro-futurism is having a political moment too. Keir Starmer, plodding through the travails of public finance squeezes, poor pre-election policy planning, foiled attempts to upend the welfare system and poll doldrums, has unearthed many ghosts of the Tony Blair era in his first year in office – all in an attempt to bring savviness and succour to an uncertain government agenda.
Blairmania may now be about to take a leap forward if, as The Sunday Times reports, Tim Allan, one of the young architects of the Blair project from opposition until he left to found a lucrative communications and lobbying company a few years later, joins Starmer. Short of a hologram of St Tony saying “Look, you just godda do X or Y”, there is no one closer to the New Labour ancestor worship.
In truth, Allan did a relatively short stint in Number 10 under Blair. But his shrewd ability to combine a progressive mindset with pro-business positions (and a proven track record as an entrepreneur, which is still a rare thing around Starmer) makes him an intriguing choice. That is, if he is approved from a short list to be appointed as a “permanent secretary for communications”: a new Civil Service role with sway over the way that the Government’s story is told across all government departments.
The more blunt question is why the PM wants to bring back another Blair-shaped appointee. He already has Liz Lloyd as director of policy delivery and innovation in Number 10 (Lloyd is another “returner” who was in a senior position under Blair), in an awkward cohabitation with Stuart Ingham, Starmer’s long-serving adviser and a co-head of No 10 policy formation with Olaf Henricson-Bell. That might be a warning in how Allan’s prospective job should be scoped out, to avoid more examples of what the late Princess Diana referred to as ”three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded”.
Jonathan Powell, Blair’s ex-chief of staff, is Starmer’s National Security Adviser while the eternal Labour consigliere Peter (Lord) Mandelson, helms the UK embassy in Washington. But the search for another big hitter to refine the Government’s message is also an admission that the habit of grafting veterans on to an unsteady central operation has not borne fruit. I have known Allan since 1994, and am an admirer of his no-nonsense way of assessing the relationship between the aspirations of centrist politics and the reality of managing business interests and external factors to consolidate the appeal of a government.
The Blair project was often unsatisfactory in its detail, but it did have a clear thrust of reconnecting Labour to the modern world which powered its long dominance. It also had a strong gut analysis of what needed to be done and what needed to change – and that is the big hole in Starmerism. The failed attempt to push a reformist benefits bill through parliament and the whiplash response of using ill-explained suspensions on a random selection of MPs who had rebelled reflected the fundamental weakness of its modus operandi: other than the diktat that obliging Rachel Reeves’s pre-election fiscal rules is unalterable, there is a lack of communication about which measures are embraced and why.
As one supportive think-tanker close to Allan put it after the welfare debacle, simply trying to govern by discipline is not enough. How can there be a joined-up way of looking at public services?
Bridget Phillipson operates at the Department for Education with a mindset closer to the union agenda of opposition to the Conservatives’ reforms; she appears sceptical of structural reforms and Teach First programmes outside conventional training, while taxing private schools is the key rallying message. Meanwhile, at the Department for Health, Wes Streeting wants to leverage the private sector alongside the public one to boost the capacities of the NHS, to the point of reviving the Blair-era idea of private sector diagnostics and treatments to shrink waiting lists.
This is incoherent – and the more urgent delivery pressures become, the less the Government’s domestic strategy is comprehensible. Witnessing Starmer up close last week at his meeting with Germany’s leader Friedrich Merz, his strengths in handling choppy foreign affairs was on display: he has been able to inveigle Emmanual Macron, Merz, and this week India’s Narendra Modi to sign a trade deal his predecessors long pursued.
Donald Trump is dropping by for golf in Scotland, which is also an opportunity for Starmer to nudge his major ally towards a trade deal and finally sorting out steel tariffs. We can argue about the trade-offs, but at least we understand the arch of the story when it comes to this government’s international approach.
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When it comes to domestic affairs, we don’t. The centre-left and left fret about trying to deal with fiscal shortfalls mainly through benefit cuts. Overall, the message is a muddle between those saying the cuts are a regrettable emergency – and those (including Starmer) who claim reforms are necessary to shake more people out of the damaging habit of worklessness.
One of the reasons Labour struggles against the rising tide of Reform UK is that it cannot decide overall whether it disparages Farage-ism on everything from its euroscepticism to its immigration and asylum clampdowns – or thinks that Farage has a point, and that the centre left needs to get rid of some of its own passions and aversions
So yes, it’s easy to see how a savvy, well-connected returning figure with a track record in complex communication methods and leveraging a clearer message would attract Starmer – and he’d be lucky to get Tim Allan on board.Yet the fundamental things apply: Starmerism needs to be clearer in Starmer’s own head and heart about what it wants and what it doesn’t – and the summer months are the times to confront this task. All the crafted narratives, the message-carriers, the TikTok feeds and socio-economically targeted podcasts follow from a key understanding of the default setting of the leader. Without that, the tribute band will remain off-key, however great the production.
Anne McElvoy is co-host of Politics at Sam and Anne’s podcast from POLITICO and Sky
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