A couple of years ago, an anecdote about Keir Starmer did the rounds at Westminster. The story was that when asked about his time leading the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), he said that his proudest achievements involved overhauling IT systems, or procurement rules, or some other highly procedural aspect of the organisation’s bureaucracy. The story was generally told with a mildly mocking tone, proof that Starmer was a bit of a plodder, not the sort of glibly agile PPE debater that generally dominates Westminster life. In essence, Starmer was seen by much of the political village as a manager, not a leader – and the village always prizes dashing leadership over efficient management.
What will happen when Labour’s national-level priorities threaten local preferences?
Starmer’s extraordinary general election victory is many things, one being a triumph of efficient management. For decades, Labour struggled to get votes where it needed them, often piling up votes in its safest seats but not winning them in Tory-held constituencies. Starmer has spectacularly ended that inefficiency. Labour’s landslide is a product of almost clinically effective targeting of campaigning resources to deliver seat after seat to Labour, many with unprecedented swings towards the party.
To put this into numbers, in 2019, Labour got 10.2 million votes and 202 seats, meaning each seat cost Labour around 50,000 votes. In 2024, Labour will probably end up with fewer than 10 million votes, but around 412 seats, meaning the party wins a seat for every 25,000-odd votes it gets. The early-hours narrative that Labour’s low national vote share (barely 35 per cent) casts some doubt on Starmer’s mandate to govern is nonsense: it’s seats, not votes, that count. A Commons majority of 170+ means that Starmer can legitimately claim to have won a historic victory.
But the extraordinary efficiency of the Labour vote still has consequences. It has created a large cohort of Labour MPs with relatively small and potentially fragile local majorities. This is the flipside of electoral efficiency: piling up votes doesn’t win general elections, but it does create safer seats. And distributing voters efficiently means you win each of your seats by a smaller margin. The net effect is that the typical Labour MP has a majority over their second-place party of around 7,000. That’s down from the 10,000 margin that the (much smaller) group of 2019 Labour MPs had.
And that 7,000 average naturally contains a broad range of numbers, some very small. As with any big Commons victory, there are new Labour MPs with tiny majorities. Labour’s Terry Jermy gave the election its signature moment when he defeated Liz Truss in South West Norfolk, but winning on barely 27 per cent of the vote means a majority of just 630.
Assuming Mr Jermy wants to remain an MP after the next general election, he’ll have to work to build up his local support base, positioning himself as a tireless local champion of South West Norfolk. He will not be alone in a localist approach to parliamentary representation. The job of being an MP has slowly been changing over the last few decades. When I did my first job in parliament in 1994 – as a dogsbody for my local Lib Dem MP – many MPs paid only limited attention to constituents’ letters and campaigns. They weren’t in parliament to act as souped-up councillors; they were there to deal with national issues.
That approach has faded away. Email and then social media have connected MPs to their voters in an immediate and powerful way. Starmer’s ruthlessly efficient overhaul of Labour candidate selection has accelerated that process: the vast majority of the 200-odd new Labour MPs coming to the Commons have clear ties to their area. A small number have been parachuted in by the leadership, but the typical Labour MP has family roots or some other longstanding connection to their seat, because non-locals were effectively weeded out during the selection process.
So that amazing Labour majority in the Commons is made up of many MPs who were already predisposed to act as servants of their voters and now find themselves elected with relatively small majorities of volatile voters. That raises a question about how easy those MPs will be for the Labour leadership to manage in the Commons. What will happen when Labour’s national-level priorities threaten local preferences? The Labour house-building agenda may be a case in point: will MPs with small majorities in southern seats where residents are opposed to new houses be keen to support construction?
The issue of jobs matters too. If you count up ministerial jobs, whips’ roles, PPS posts and a few made-up titles like ‘trade envoy’, there might be 160 payroll jobs in government whose holders are largely obliged to follow the government’s national agenda. That leaves Labour with around 250 backbenchers, many of whom will feel under significant pressure to deliver for their constituents.
The bottom line is that Starmer’s government will have a little less power than you might expect at first glance. Don’t get this out of perspective: it’s still a famous, smashing victory, which will imbue the new PM with significant authority over his party. But those backbench MPs who make up that majority, who got their seats thanks to Starmer’s ruthless electoral efficiency, will still be key players in the years ahead and they may sometimes decide that their own best interests do not always lie in backing their leader’s agenda. Starmer has won himself a lot of power, but the efficiency of his victory means those local champions on the backbench will matter a lot too.
Comments