Will the cost of living crisis win it for Keir Starmer? Don’t bank on it

The squeeze on living standards is more important than lockdown-busting parties, but will it deliver Labour votes? John Rentoul looks at the odds

We will see next week at the local elections how effective Labour’s cost-of-living attack is (PA)

What the French know as “purchasing power” – Le pouvoir d’achat – was Marine Le Pen’s big issue in the French election on Sunday, and you can interpret that in two ways. One would be that 42 per cent of French voters are not racist pro-Putin extremists, because the cost of living drove a lot of the non-metropolitan protest vote Le Pen’s way regardless of her ideology.

The other would be that, even with the advantage of a cost of living crisis and a sharp tilt to the moderate centre, Le Pen didn’t come close to winning.

I’m not saying that Le Pen’s reputation as the leader of an extremist, beyond-the-pale movement is comparable to Jeremy Corbyn’s reputation, which Labour is likewise trying to shake off. Corbyn nearly won in 2017, which is an obstinate refutation of the simplistic extreme-versus-moderate reading of British politics.

But Labour is trying to make the most of our problems with the cost of living in a similarly ruthless and non-ideological way. This prompted something most unusual at last week’s meeting of the shadow cabinet: a debate about political strategy. Lisa Nandy, the shadow levelling-up secretary, warned against the party focusing too much on Downing Street parties and said Labour should be doing more to capitalise on voters’ anger about rising prices and taxes.

Her comments provoked a sharp response from some other members of the shadow cabinet, one of whom told HuffPost anonymously: “She pissed everyone off because we’ve hardly seen her in the local election campaign.” Another accused her of creating a false divide, because no one in the shadow cabinet was arguing that lockdown-busting parties were more important, and everyone agreed that the local election campaign should be about the cost of living above all.

But there is a difference in emphasis. If Nandy was saying that there was slightly too much glee on the Labour side of the Commons at Boris Johnson’s discomfort last week, and an over-eagerness to call him a liar, then I think she has a point. A more disciplined Labour Party might have been able to hold two opinions at once: namely that Johnson presided over a “do as I say, don’t do as I do” culture in Downing Street, and that he and Rishi Sunak should be doing more to protect people from the effects of rising energy bills.

And Nandy was right to warn that there is a danger in focusing on the lockdown parties: that is, for voters who haven’t already decided that Johnson is an amoral monster, the idea that politicians are “all as bad as each other”, and that Labour is just as out of touch with what people really care about, which is how expensive everything is. The topic of Keir Starmer’s bottle of beer keeps coming up, with some people unable to see why “there’s no equivalence” between that and the prime minister having some cake in a work meeting.

We will see at the local elections, on Thursday next week, how effective Labour’s cost-of-living attack is – not that local councils and mayors have much to do with gas bills, but any election is a chance to protest. The prime minister is obviously worried, having used today’s cabinet meeting as an excuse for a press release about how he is asking all ministers to come up with ideas to help with the cost of living. It sounds desperate, but it may be that it is intended as a reminder to ministers and spokespeople to keep talking about the people’s priorities. Johnson is the real cabinet’s version of Lisa Nandy.

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It also feels like a holding position designed to last until Friday of next week, when the scale of the electoral damage can be assessed and the need for another awkward conversation with the chancellor about spending more money can be weighed up. Today’s public finance figures suggest that there might be more scope for the sorts of measures that Sunak should have taken in March to be taken now.

Labour has a strong position on the cost of living, mainly thanks to the fig leaf of its proposed windfall tax on the oil and gas companies, which allows it to offer slightly more help for the hard-pressed than the government – and Nandy is right that the party ought to make the most of it.

But in the longer run there is a danger for the opposition, in that the government might succeed in cynically aligning the economic and electoral cycles for its own benefit. If the economic pain is felt this year, and things start to feel better next year, with inflation subsiding and tax revenues buoyant, the chancellor could be well placed for a classic pre-election giveaway.

The lessons that British politics can take from Le Pen’s failure on Sunday are limited. But it is a reminder that le pouvoir d’achat is not a guarantee of electoral victory.