The very modest poll ‘bounce’ that Rishi Sunak delivered for the Tories after the farcical Liz Truss premiership has proved to be of the dead cat variety. The most recent YouGov poll showed the Conservatives at just 22 per cent – about half the vote share they achieved in the 2019 general election. This, you might think, explains Labour’s buoyant 47 per cent rating in the same poll. Well, not really.
Because digging deeper into the figures reveals that only 15 per cent of 2019 Tory voters have switched to Keir Starmer’s party. That’s about one in seven. Even the little-known Reform party led by Richard Tice is doing better than that, chalking up the support of 16 per cent of Boris Johnson’s collapsed coalition of Tory voters from four years ago.
This pattern of Tory supporters drifting away and yet not actively switching to Labour has been the way of things for over a year now. Perhaps one might expect to pick up indications of a growing sense of desperation in Labour circles about the mission to scoop them up and guarantee a landslide win in 2024. But there is almost no sign of that.
Starmer is a champion at what Willie Whitelaw described as ‘going around the country stirring up apathy’
In fact, Labour’s brightest strategists appear to have accepted that Starmer is never going to turn blue voters red in the way that Tony Blair did a generation ago. He simply isn’t in Blair’s league as a communicator. Neither are his antennae naturally attuned, as Blair’s were in the early days, to the demographic we then knew as ‘Middle England’.
Starmer by contrast is a more standard issue north London leftie lawyer. His natural instincts led him to kneel for BLM, to take the side of the whiney Sussexes against the late Queen, to argue for the scrapping of detention centres for illegal immigrants and to claim it is wrong to say that only a woman can have a cervix. His only other notable quality is dullness, leading him to be cruelly mocked by the very exciting Johnson as a ‘human bollard’.
But the clever Mandelsonians who now run Starmer have had a brilliant insight: they simply don’t need to convert 2019 Tories into Labour voters to win a majority. Such is the rage of the Tory tribe towards its own party these days that huge chunks of it are unlikely to turn out at all on polling day so long as the prospect of Starmer in Downing Street does not terrify them.
This means that were Starmer’s Labour to match the 12.9 million votes the party got in 2017 then that would almost certainly deliver a comfortable majority in a low turnout election. The mission now is not the unrealistic moonshot of converting lots of Tories into active Starmer voters but an eminently more achievable one of making him seem ‘meh’ to them.
It turns out that this is much more up his street. Not only has he been willing to have his mouth taped up against further outpourings of ultra social liberalism or identity politics, but he has become a champion at what Willie Whitelaw once described as ‘going around the country stirring up apathy’.
Every few weeks the dogged Starmer team are also offering up a policy sacrifice to further placate right-of-centre voters; abandoning plans to nationalise things, slowing down green spending, turning against the concept of free movement, opposing public sector strikes, dumping a commitment to increase income tax rates for top earners.
There will be much more of this in the months ahead. For starters, anyone betting on Labour’s current policy of clamping down on the tax privileges of private schools making it into its election manifesto is a mug.
Never has so much socialist sentiment been discarded in pursuit of so modest a goal: to become dreary rather than alarming to Conservative-leaning voters. In this mission, Starmer has been greatly assisted by the arrival of ‘snoring, boring’ Rachel Reeves as shadow chancellor in place of the wildly eccentric Anneliese Dodds.
Does Reeves look like someone who wants to increase our taxes? No more so than Jeremy Hunt. Does Starmer come across as the chi-chi radical he appeared to be in his days as Jeremy Corbyn’s kinsman? Only to those of us with long memories.
Is the enraged and betrayed Tory tribe going to allow fear of this pair to get in the way of a long-awaited opportunity to take revenge on its own team? Not if Project Drear comes to fruition.
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