For all that some pundits have tried to present Labour’s local elections as middling, Shabana Mahmood is having none of it. Asked how she would have viewed such results for 2023 when she became national campaigns coordinator two years earlier, the response is adamant. “I’d have bitten your arm off,” the Birmingham Ladywood MP says without hesitation. “I’d have done a sort of, ‘Please God, inshallah, let that be true.’ “I never doubted we could make progress. When I was offered the job I felt like, I can make a difference. But from where we were in 2019, if you had have said to me, this is where we’d be now, in 2023, I’d have thought you were insane.” The role, which Mahmood took over from Angela Rayner in May 2021, is not the most visible but is particularly vital for a party which, she concedes, was “completely outplayed” by Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019. Working closely with Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s campaign director, Mahmood has helped oversee a shift towards data and the most effective use of resources, as against an approach in 2019 viewed as sometimes chaotic and unfocused. Mahmood says last week’s gains of 500-plus seats and 71 councils was a direct vindication of this new approach, not least as her team piloted several strategies planned for the general election. “We had eight local authorities that were too close to call, based on our own data, and we did shift resources and activists in the very last phase of the campaign. And of those, we won six, we pushed one into no overall control and, with Darlington, we fell one seat short of a majority.
“I can look at that and say, we delivered those results based on the data operation team at HQ.” For all that she argues the results place Labour on course for a Commons majority, Mahmood happily admits that when Keir Starmer initially checked the preparations for a possible snap election, the answer was not entirely reassuring. “When he first asked the question – this is quite a few months ago – I was a bit like, ‘It’s just a little Excel spreadsheet with a few headings on it,’” she says. “I used to describe that as our ‘break glass in case of emergency plan’: messy, but it would get the job done. But I’m very happy to say we’ve got everything in place.” As part of the pre-election push, Mahmood’s team also sets Labour MPs’ minimum thresholds for the campaigning they undertake, which is then noted and analysed. “I know exactly who didn’t meet their target, let’s just put it that way,” she says. “They’ll be hearing about it. I also know exactly who did, and who exceeded it, and they’ll be hearing about it too.” Perhaps Mahmood’s most vital task ahead of the general election is to help present Starmer as a likely prime minister to a voting public who can seem uninterested – not just in the Labour leader, but in politics more widely. “It’s a slightly wider question about politics being an answer and not the problem, and that’s a hurdle we all have to cross,” she says. “But if we can get a hearing on that, everything about Keir’s track record and his natural disposition comes through as a problem fixer. And I think that’s a key asset for us because it’s exactly what the country needs. “It’s like people have had the hope beaten out of them,” Mahmood says. “It almost feels like the Tory strategy, to imply that there’s nothing anybody can do about anything, that it’s all about external factors.” She is understandably dismissive of complaints that Starmer has yet to fully move on from presenting broader aspirations to outlining specific policies, saying the party had “very solid retail offers” on crime and the NHS last week. Equally, she argues, Labour has to stress that some issues are structural and cannot be fixed immediately: “I think that gets us a bit more of a hearing because, firstly it’s true, and also people appreciate the acknowledgment of that.” All this is happening amid an electoral landscape that has changed immeasurably since Mahmood became an MP in 2010; a time she says that “feels like it was 100 years ago”. One part of this is the breakup of tribal voting blocks, something Mahmood says she takes an almost paradoxical comfort from: “In a funny sort of way that gives me quite a lot of hope for our future. I don’t think it has to be riven with the same kind of polarisation as we see in the US and other places. “We’ve definitely had a pretty stressful and divisive phase, but if we can get past that sense of people having the hope beaten out of them, lots of voters are in play for both political parties. I think is actually better for our democracy.”