Labour promised one thing to the British people at the last general election: change.
That word stood on its own on the front page of the party’s winning manifesto, with a photo of Sir Keir Starmer – ready, it was implied, to deliver on the change that voters wanted.
No wonder. Britain endured a miserable decade and a half leading up to the 2024 election: financial crisis, the interminable Brexit fallout, the Covid pandemic and a painful bout of inflation sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and exacerbated by political blunders.
Prime ministers had marched into office promising to change everything, and marched out with their approval ratings plunged into negative territory – Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak.
Enter Starmer. He knew this public mood of irritability, even despondency, was a problem; and, unlike his predecessors, he did not have to justify any of the decisions that were taken by the various Conservative governments.
In opposition, he was downbeat about the country’s fortunes, shading sometimes into anger (real or feigned) at the way the Tories had conducted themselves. What he did not realise is that government requires a very different demeanour.
Voters look to their leader to inspire them, to offer hope that a better future lies ahead – preferably, not very far ahead. Starmer has an extended list of policies, which he says will make Britain better in the short or long term, but rarely is he able to knit them together into a compelling narrative of optimism.
So often, the Prime Minister offers up excuses for why we are still in a hole: the Tories screwed everything up, bond markets have us in their power, Putin and Trump are messing us about.
What he does not do is provide a vision for how exactly things will get better, and fast. Ministers are despairing of this gloomy mood – which started, they point out, almost as soon as Labour came to power. “We won the general election on the promise of change,” one frontbencher says. “Then the first thing the Prime Minister did was go out and tell everyone that things were shit and going to get even worse. Even the body language was so negative.”
Ed Miliband echoed this diagnosis at a gathering of left-wing economic wonks this week, saying: “Hope is the biggest thing that matters. I think it’s really important, this. People feel they’ve been in a long, dark tunnel really since 2008 and the cost of living crisis. Hope is the commodity that we have to offer as a Government.”
The Energy Secretary was careful not to point the finger at Starmer directly, of course – or at Rachel Reeves, who is often accused of being equally gloomy. But he is only the most senior of a large number of Labour MPs to have gone public with their concerns that right now, their party is not being associated with hope in the eyes of the public.
This might seem a bit abstract at a time when what is threatening the Prime Minister’s position most directly is a set of very concrete, detailed questions about the process of appointing Peter Mandelson as Ambassador to Washington. But it is not. The reason that Starmer is in danger is not because of the mistake he made over Mandelson: that would be eminently survivable if there were enough people inside and outside Westminster who thought that there were good, positive reasons to keep him in post that outweigh this error of judgement.
Contrast him with the two insurgent populist leaders of our time. Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski are divisive figures, and both rely on sometimes hair-raising pictures of the status quo, but both Reform UK and the Greens ground their appeal on a breezy – almost utopian – argument that a profound improvement to society is coming if only they can get into power. And they push this message at upbeat rallies which look more like parties than seminars.
There are limits to how far Starmer can go in imitating his rivals, of course. He is no populist, and it is central to his pitch for power that he grounds his policy offering in the real world, such as acknowledging the need for balanced public finances and controlled but pro-growth migration rules.
The Prime Minister hopes to use the King’s Speech, coming just days after what will be a bruising set of local elections next month, to set out a more positive tone. It may well be enough to keep MPs on side for a few more weeks. But he needs to ensure he is speaking directly to the country too, to show that there is still a point to the Starmer project.
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