Keir Starmer had a very specific comms strategy during the election campaign: fight on your own turf and don’t get dragged into someone else’s agenda. Don’t get distracted by the fight the Conservatives want to have on culture or tax – stick to the script and rise above it. The problem with this tune is that it is one – to coin a football phrase – that you can sing when you’re winning. And even in the election campaign there were times when this came a cropper. Starmer’s weakest moment of the six-week campaign was the first debate against Rishi Sunak, where the Labour leader ploughed ahead with his own talking points and ignored Sunak’s wild assertion about £2,000 tax rises. They were misleading figures, and the Labour leader wanted to ignore them. But he did not directly rebut them and that left a wide open goal. It gave newspapers and broadcasters the opening to put the claims on the front pages and bulletins. There was also a terrible week of rows over selections when the weakness of that strategy was exposed. But, broadly speaking, the Labour campaign was remarkably disciplined. Now the strategy in government is similar: stay focused on delivery, push on to the budget and the major legislation coming this autumn on housing, the economy and workers rights – issues voters care about.
But in the past week we have seen the strained limits of that approach. Labour cabinet ministers and advisers are privately despairing about the onslaught of damaging stories about donations of clothes, hospitality and holidays. In Starmer’s inner circle, there is a deep sense of injustice – perhaps understandable – at the comparisons being made with Boris Johnson’s government – who did not follow the rules, particularly during Covid, and when donors routinely paid for lavish holidays and even the former prime minister’s wedding. Starmer, they say, is getting this flak for being diligent. But that perceived unfairness in the treatment of Starmer v Johnson seems like it is not an argument that washes with the general public, if polling and focus groups are to be believed. Starmer himself should know this well; he persisted with his attacks on Johnson on Partygate and cronyism when many around him, including in the shadow cabinet, thought he should change the record. His closest advisers insist he was proved right to do that because he saw how much it touched a public nerve. Which makes it all the more strange that they could not see this particular scandal around the corner. Every time a picture of Starmer is on the evening news, he is wearing the glasses that people now associate with donations from Waheed Alli. There is a public disbelief that donations should be made by Lord Alli to cover Starmer and his wife’s clothes. Fair or unfair, that is the reality. It seems that senior figures have a very particular blind spot when it comes to Alli, who has been a close friend to many in the shadow cabinet and worked deep within the Labour operation during the election campaign. They seem him as an innocent party who simply wanted to help and cared about getting a Labour government, a TV man who could tell Starmer directly that he needed to smarten his act up. That blurred any risk they might have otherwise perceived about Alli being seen first and foremost as a donor by the wider public – an assumption that now feels extremely naive. The result appears to be something verging on paralysis. Cabinet ministers have been on broadcast rounds without any coherent position, arguing that taxpayer funded clothing is normal abroad (it isn’t) or that the media have been unfair or that the transparency has been, if anything, too robust. It took four days for the prime minister to say he would never again take donations for such personal items. Labour conference should be the moment to reshape that narrative – and the party may yet use it to do so. But it is somewhat boxed in by the determination to stick to a narrative of how painful things are to come and to avoid a populist insistence that everything can be rosy. Some cabinet ministers are disturbed by that approach and have begun more forcefully making the argument that voters simply do not see this moment the same way they saw George Osborne’s austerity response to the global financial crisis – they voted for political change and improved public services. They argue the strategy must change now – that rebuttal must be fast and aggressive, not aloof. And that the undertaker-esque demeanour of Starmer and Reeves must also change and speak to the moment of hopefulness that many of them felt about the return of a Labour government and what it could do.