Five ways Keir Starmer could still blow it

Labour scored a significant victory in the Rutherglen by-election, but there is a year until the general election, writes John Rentoul – and they must navigate policies from tax to small boats to prevent a last minute capsizing

Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is currently 17 points ahead of the Conservatives – quite a buffer (PA)

The Rutherglen by-election was an excellent result for Labour. All those people, including me, who said that there was no enthusiasm for Keir Starmer among the electorate have to accept that, for someone to whom the voters are indifferent, he leads a party that wins a lot of votes.

Coming after a remarkable result in rural Selby in July, which was obscured by the Conservatives holding on in urban Uxbridge, the latest by-election reinforces Scotland-wide opinion polls that suggest Labour could win 20 seats from the Scottish National Party. That, in turn, makes it easier for Labour to win a Commons majority, needing to be 5-8 points ahead of the Tories in national vote share.

This gives Labour, currently an average of 17 points ahead, quite a buffer for the year until the likely date of the general election.

However, let me pretend to be a Starmer loyalist. Allow me to take the Labour leader at his word when he says “no complacency”. If I really, really wanted Labour to win, I should be worrying about how it might not. I could be the “red team”, working out what might go wrong, so that the party is better prepared to maximise the chances that things will go right.

So let us look at five ways in which Starmer could still blow it.

The first is the economy. Given that the one issue that the most voters care most about, for several years, has been the cost of living, we might expect things to change if it eases enough for people to notice. Average wages are now rising faster than prices, and the state pension will also rise in April in real terms.

There will be a tax cut in April pay statements, which is what Jeremy Hunt meant when he said it was difficult to see tax cuts this year. And it is as likely that the economy will perform better than forecasts as it is that it will do worse.

Against all that, Starmer can hope that people are so fed up with the Tories that they bank the cost-of-living gains and say to themselves: “Now we can afford a Labour government.” It is certainly true that the economy was doing well in 1997, which did John Major absolutely no good at all. But if Rishi Sunak can turn round his personal unpopularity, it is possible that the cost of living could be a positive issue for him.

The second is the cost of ambitious schemes for the future. Despite the poor handling of the announcements, Sunak can present himself as protecting people from the excessive costs of net-zero policies, and of HS2. Starmer has tried to avoid the obvious trap of big spending promises, or of reversing big spending cuts. Labour has ditched – sorry, postponed – its £28bn-a-year plan to borrow for green investment. On Thursday, Starmer said he would not reinstate the plan to build the second stage of HS2 in full.

Yet Sunak has opened up a rhetorical gap. He poses as the guardian of taxpayers’ money, who will go deep into the spreadsheets to strip out waste and optimistic assumptions. He has made clear that if there is a choice between progress to net zero and a price to be paid by citizens, he is against progress. Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Ed Miliband are still at the rhetorical stage of saying that nothing is more important than the climate emergency, and denying that there is a cost to net zero. Indeed, Miliband often implies that faster progress to net zero will save households money, rather than cost them. It should not be beyond the wit of the Tory election campaign to show that this is not the case.

I am surprised, in fact, that Tory HQ hasn’t got round to costing the difference between what Gary Smith of the GMB union calls Labour’s “impossible” plan to decarbonise electricity generation by 2030 and the government’s target of 2035. Perhaps they are waiting for a quiet news day.

The third chance for the Tories to close the gap with Labour would be if Sunak makes dramatic headway in stopping the small boats.

If the Supreme Court rules in the government’s favour, I assume that each person whom the Home Office tries to put on a plane to Rwanda will challenge their individual case, so it is not going to be simple. I also assume that the deterrent effect on people waiting for dinghies on the north French coast will be small. But it is possible that Sunak’s solutions start to work. It may be that initiatives such as that agreed with Ursula von der Leyen, the EU commission president, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, and Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, in the margins of the Granada summit on Thursday could make a difference.

The fourth possibility would be if the government starts to get NHS waiting lists down. I realise that we are now straying into the wilder realms of fantasy. Even if Sunak bought off the doctors with an irresponsible, inflationary pay rise, it seems unlikely that things in the NHS will be appreciably better within a year.

Finally, there is always the unexpected. There are known unknowns: an issue such as trans rights could take off in ways that Starmer has not prepared for – although it looks as if Labour now has a safe, middle position on the issue. Or it could be something completely out of the blue. But if the Tories are reduced to hoping for a god from the machine to resolve a plot in which all seems lost, that does suggest that they are in trouble.

In fact, looking at that list of five possible plot lines, you might think that Sunak would need at least three of them to happen together to be in with a chance of stopping Labour winning a Commons majority.

And then there is Starmer’s last line of defence, which is that even if the election produces a hung parliament, he would still be prime minister. Unless the Conservatives are very close to a majority of their own – close enough that the Democratic Unionist Party, currently with eight MPs, can get them over the line – the other minor parties have already said that they will allow Labour to form a minority government.

For Sunak to stay in No 10, the Tories need to be ahead of Labour in share of the vote, possibly by up to four percentage points.

It doesn’t seem very likely, does it?