Starmer is following Blair’s 1997 election-winning plan – even the ‘Luvvies for Labour’ are back

Keir Starmer has won the backing of Britain’s most eminent artists and actors – but, rather than being a key ‘moment’ in a winning election campaign, the open-letter endorsement feels like a throwback to a distant political era, says John Rentoul

Labour leader Keir Starmer with actor Idris Elba (PA)

A group of “leaders, investors and practitioners” has written a joint letter under the banner of “Arts for Labour”, saying that the creative industries would “benefit from the ambition of a Labour government”.

It has been signed by the great and the good of the arts world: Bill Nighy, Emily Watson, Grayson Perry, Hugh Bonneville, Lesley Manville, Norman Cook, Imelda Staunton and Keeley Hawes.

How evocative it all seems of more innocent times, 27 years ago, when Tony Blair erected his “big tent” across not just the centre ground of British politics but over the country’s entire cultural hinterland, too.

It is hard to recapture the national mood of 1997. There were some striking similarities between the commentaries then and now. It was said that there was no great enthusiasm for Blair’s New Labour. There were complaints about how cautious, unambitious and right wing the opposition’s programme was. The presentation was all very slick and professional, it was said, including group letters to newspapers of Labour supporters in the worlds of arts, business and academia – but where was the substance?

Yet there was something in the air – not to get too Thunderclap Newman about it – a sense of optimism and the possibility of a new beginning that was captured perfectly by Blair’s quizzical “A new dawn has broken, has it not?” on the morning after the election

The sense of anticipation is in a much lower key this time round, mainly because there is a sober realisation of the difficult economic bequest that the new government will inherit.

It is true that a lot of excitement and enthusiasm for New Labour came after the vote in 1997, rather than before, as the electorate turned out to be surprised and delighted by what it had done. Maybe something like that will happen on 5 July, if Keir Starmer and his top team can match the scale of the electoral earthquake with their early rhetoric and actions.

But it feels as if the emotional temperature is lower this time, both in the anticipation before the election and in the possible celebration afterwards.

Starmer is very much following the Blair election-winning plan, but he seems to be sticking to the numbered instructions, step by step, rather than being inspired by the vision of hope and the excitement of achieving something that the Labour Party had never achieved before.

The instruction booklet says modest pledges on a pledge card, a defensive campaign and an attempt to present Labour as being at the leading edge of social, cultural and generational change.

But this last bit in particular seems to be a matter of going through the motions. A group letter signed by luvvies in The Times? Tick. A group letter of business leaders, also in The Times? Tick. But the business letter last month didn’t include two of the party’s biggest endorsers, Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, or Seb James, the chief executive of Boots.

Nor does either of the 2024 letters convey the same sense of the fresh start that was offered in 1997. Then, Labour succeeded in identifying itself with Britpop, even if Blair himself never uttered the phrase “Cool Britannia”, and a hope that the new government offered real change from the supposed philistinism of the Thatcher-Major years.

In the 1990s, Blair was able to scoop up support from an unprecedented array of big business leaders because of his conditional support for a single European currency – many big companies thought Tory Euroscepticism was a danger to their interests.

This time, “changed” Labour’s claim to the social, cultural and business hinterlands seems a pale imitation of the New Labour original. Where it was bliss to be alive in the dawn that broke over the Royal Festival Hall on 2 May 1997, the Labour Party seems more ambivalent about a possibly even greater landslide here in 2024. This time, it seems to be slouching towards the New Jerusalem.