Labour’s poll ratings are dreadful – here’s how they can bounce back

Keir Starmer’s first 100 days in office have been marred by unenforced errors – but his new chief of staff has kickstarted a radical overhaul of the Downing Street operation, says John Rentoul

A new opinion poll puts Keir Starmer’s Labour just one point ahead of the Conservatives (EPA)

Top Blairites tell me they are “not surprised” by Labour’s one-point lead in the latest opinion poll, carried out at the weekend. Some holders of a torch for New Labour are “in despair” about Keir Starmer’s early stumbles in government.

The More in Common poll has spooked Labour people – even though it is just one poll; even though it reflects only a small change from two weeks ago, when Labour’s lead was four points; and even though it is too early in a parliament for voting intention polls to mean much.

However, it is not where Labour hoped to be as it approaches its first 100 days in office. What is striking about the poll is the message that if the right-wing parties got their act together, Labour would be in trouble. The Conservative and Reform votes together add up to 47 per cent of the electorate, against Labour’s 29 per cent.

The right-wing vote divided the election in such a way as to give Labour a huge majority on the lowest share of the vote for a party leading a government since the war. But it would be easier in theory to reunite the right than to put together a “rainbow” coalition of Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, whose support also adds up to 47 per cent.

The poll adds to the nervousness among Blairites that the prime minister lacks a clear sense of direction. This was expressed in public with surprising bluntness by Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former communications director, on BBC radio on Monday. He said that governing was about “the relentless, endless, never-ending conversation that you’re having with the country about what you’re trying to do – that bit has been largely missing”.

Campbell and other leading lights in the Blair government have been horrified by the stories of gifts of suits, glasses and Taylor Swift tickets, and the delay before Starmer tried last week to put an end to them by paying back some of the freebies he received since the election.

Campbell is also worried about the long delay before the Budget on 30 October. “When Margaret Thatcher won in 1979, Geoffrey Howe delivered the Budget five weeks after the election,” he told the BBC. “Gordon Brown in 1997 delivered the Budget eight weeks after the election. David Cameron and [George] Osborne in 2010 – six weeks. We’re having to wait almost 16 weeks since the election. And I think that is what creates this sense of people not quite sure what the government’s about.”

That vacuum had been filled by a Tory press eager to magnify genuine tensions in No 10. Now, though, Starmer has tried to resolve them by replacing Sue Gray with Morgan McSweeney as his chief of staff.

This repeats the pattern that has been set twice already in Starmer’s career. When Starmer ran for the Labour leadership, he gave McSweeney total control of the campaign. Later, he gave McSweeney total control of Labour’s general election campaign. In between, there was a cloudy phase in their relationship: when McSweeney was moved from being chief of staff to Labour HQ in 2021, it was reported that he was being blamed for the party’s defeat in the Hartlepool by-election – the low point of Starmer’s leadership.

But it gradually emerged that McSweeney had a steely grip not just on the general election campaign, but on the selection of Labour candidates: Starmer had given McSweeney total authority over everything that mattered.

I am told that Blair himself was puzzled by this, because he had assumed that Starmer’s politics were closer to Ed Miliband’s than to his own, whereas McSweeney had previously run Liz Kendall’s leadership campaign when she was the Blairite candidate, finishing in fourth place, in 2015.

What we now know is that, while Starmer’s instincts may lean to the soft left, his ruthlessness in pursuit of power means that he is prepared to subcontract everything to McSweeney, who has been described to me as being on the “hard right of the Labour Party”.

Now Starmer has done it again, gambling his premiership on giving McSweeney total control of No 10. This means admitting it was a mistake to have Gray, the ultimate bureaucrat, as his chief of staff. He needs a political brain to lead what Campbell calls that “never-ending conversation” with the country about what the government is trying to do. The civil service can take care of the admin.

That will probably mean a sharpening of Starmer’s five technocratic “missions”, which were devised with Gray as a means of preparing for government. I am told that McSweeney is likely to focus on the NHS and immigration above everything else.

The Blairites remember the stumbles they made in their early time in office, and know that the road to the next election is a long haul. Campbell took issue with Mishal Husain of the BBC talking about the Starmer government as “a complete, irrecoverable shambles”. He said: “I don’t think it is.”

The early mistakes have made it harder, but people want the government to succeed – and if McSweeney can deliver, the opinion polls at this stage will be forgotten.