Keir Starmer needs to surprise voters rather than keep doing ‘politics by numbers’

The Labour leader is entering the hardest phase of opposition, writes John Rentoul: the long haul and the struggle for headlines

Can you identify this political leader? (REUTERS)

The hardest thing for politicians, and for people who write about them, to remember is how little most people know about politics. James Johnson, the former No 10 pollster, asked a group of floating voters last week what they thought of Keir Starmer. “Is he the money guy?” asked one of them, apparently confusing Starmer with Rishi Sunak. 

That is not to say that Starmer is failing as leader of the opposition. It is bound to be hard for him to gain attention at a time of national crisis, and he has managed to position the Labour Party well by not alienating those voters who are paying attention. Other members of James Johnson’s focus group had noticed that he wasn’t Jeremy Corbyn, which they thought was a good thing. He has passed the first test for an opposition leader, which is that he holds his own against Boris Johnson when opinion polls ask who would be the better prime minister. 

Even without the coronavirus, however, this would be the hardest phase for an opposition leader. The next election is probably a long way off, yet Starmer has to lay the foundations now. No wonder he focuses on competence, a question that matters during the crisis but which will also matter at the next election when (we hope) the virus is a fading memory. 

The problem for him is that competence is dull. He devoted four of his six questions to the prime minister yesterday to the home office accidentally deleting some police computer records. He wasn’t going to get anywhere with it. No one thinks Johnson is personally responsible for pressing “Y” when the computer asked: “Are you sure you want to delete this data? Y/N.” The aim was to portray the government generally as incompetent. 

This is “politics by numbers”. Maybe it works. I remember when HM Revenue and Customs lost two computer discs containing the entire nation’s child benefit records because a civil servant had put them in the internal mail in 2007. It didn’t exactly help Gordon Brown’s government, but I’m not sure it had any lasting effect on its reputation for competence. The way Brown handled the financial crash the following year was much more important. Today, the way the government is organising vaccinations matters more to people than the home office’s computer failings. 

The only thing that focus groups are interested in now is vaccinations, apparently, and they think the government is doing a good job. If there are problems with that then maybe the incompetence message will kick back in. It was notable that Starmer had more success with his last two questions yesterday, about Priti Patel’s disclosure that she had pressed for the borders to be closed last March. Labour didn’t call for that at the time, and nor did the government scientists advise it, but it all adds to the view, firmly fixed in the public’s mind, that the government acted too slowly. Yet, if the vaccination programme goes well, it seems that most voters will give the government the benefit of the doubt in a difficult situation. 

Meanwhile, Starmer has to maintain a sense of discipline and urgency in his team over a three-year period. He has to organise the fleet of egos known as the shadow cabinet to make speeches, give interviews and issue endless press releases that stick to the central messages. Most of the time, he and his colleagues will achieve “cut through” in the news headlines only when they depart from the script. Lisa Nandy, the shadow foreign secretary, for example, yesterday accused Johnson of “trying to start a culture war over a statue of Churchill” – inevitably distorted by Conservative MPs as implying support for protesters who defaced the statue in Parliament Square in the summer. 

That may not matter much: cutting through to headlines in the Daily Mail is not the same as cutting through to focus group members who can’t tell Starmer and Sunak apart. But every layer of sediment deposited by stories such as that matters a bit and accumulates over time. The only way for Starmer to offset the effect is to come up with a stream of surprising announcements that generate headlines on his own terms. His only moment of that kind recently was when he excluded Corbyn from membership of the Parliamentary Labour Party: that was “politics by numbers” from the Tony Blair colouring book. 

When opinion polls tell us that Starmer has positive ratings, it is worth remembering that the figures exclude a large proportion – about a quarter – of the population who say “don’t know”, even before we get to counting people who think they do know but who have mixed him up with someone else. 

About the same proportion of the population approve of Boris Johnson as of Starmer (about 40 per cent): the difference is that Johnson has fewer don’t knows (about 6 per cent), and more people who disapprove of him. 

Starmer’s “don’t know” score will decline between now and the few weeks of the election campaign. He needs to make sure they don’t drift into the “disapprove” category, which means he has to surprise them by saying things they agree with. By the time of the election, many of even the least attentive voters will take an interest – and might even be able to tell the difference between the leader of the opposition and the chancellor of the exchequer.