The Labour veteran was scathing. ‘Starmer’s blown it already,’ he said. ‘He’s kicked off the local election campaign by saying to the voters, “I don’t care what you do, I’m staying.” He’s basically sticking two fingers up to them. And they’re going to punish him.’
Over the past week, Downing Street has certainly been pushing a clear and consistent narrative. The results of next May’s elections will be bad for Labour. But whatever verdict the electorate delivers, the Prime Minister will remain unmoved. Instead, as one newspaper was briefed, he will deploy a strategy of ‘minimise, warn and distract’.
This will involve downplaying the scale of the losses, scaring Labour MPs with the prospect of an Angela Rayner premiership, and trying to shift the political focus with a swiftly deployed King’s speech, followed by a possible reshuffle.
But there’s one fundamental flaw in No 10’s masterplan. Which is that the losses about to inflicted on Starmer and his party are set to be far, far worse than their worst nightmares.
During the past month Sir Keir and his staff have made the fatal mistake of believing their own publicity. Or rather, believing their own spin.
Since the start of Donald Trump’s ill-starred assault on Iran, the Prime Minister’s aides have been peddling the line that by distancing himself from the President’s adventurism, he was set to enjoy a popularity boost. They pointed to polling that showed 70 per cent of those questioned supported Starmer’s stance of trying to keep Britain out of the conflict.
But that alignment between his policy and the public mood is not producing any meaningful political dividend. A majority of those asked still believe his overall handling of the war has been bad.
His personal approval ratings have barely shifted, ticking up marginally from a dire minus 48 to an equally dire minus 44. And Labour’s national poll average is 17 per cent, exactly the same as when the war began.
Sir Keir Starmer speaks with Milton Keynes residents this month as he campaigns ahead of the local elections on May 7
As one Labour MP told me: ‘It started as a line-to-take from No10. But then they started to think it was true. The reality is no one cares about Starmer’s stance on the war. It’s still cost of living, immigration and the fact everyone thinks we’re no better than the Tories were.’
The idea of a Love Actually Bounce – where Starmer replicates Hugh Grant and wins plaudits for standing up to a bullying US President – was only ever a fiction. And it’s one that is about to be brutally exposed in five weeks’ time.
First, there is the fresh carnage Reform is about to inflict in Labour’s northern working-class heartlands. Some of Starmer’s aides had been clinging to the hope the Farage surge had finally peaked, and that the emergence of an anti-Reform coalition could mitigate their losses. And there are indeed signs that the purple wave is gradually receding in the national polls.
But in the Red Wall – where the perception is of a binary choice between endorsing Starmer or rejecting his woke, milquetoast centrism – Labour is facing an extinction level event.
In some of the former North East bastions, such as Sunderland, party officials believe they will be lucky to emerge from election night with a single seat intact. Then there are the former metropolitan strongholds such as London. Until now, the inner cities had seemed insulated from the collapse of support Labour was experiencing nationwide. But the Gorton and Denton by-election, and the surge of support for the Green Party that has followed Hannah Spencer’s triumph, has changed all that.
Current polling shows that as many as 19 of the party’s 21 councils in the capital could now be under threat. What’s more, Zack Polanski’s insurgents aren’t simply at Keir Starmer’s gates – they’re at his front door.
One of the Green’s key aims is snatching away control of Starmer’s own Camden Council, even though they currently have only a single councillor.
As part of the ‘minimise’ element of Team Starmer’s strategy, his supporters are attempting to manage expectations by comparing the likely scale of Labour losses with those experienced by Tony Blair in 1999, which saw him relinquish more than 1,000 seats to William Hague’s Tories. But that is a comparison that is entirely specious.
In 1999, Blair was facing typical mid-term discontent, and a political landscape in which the two main parties commanded 70 per cent of the vote. What Starmer is facing is a potentially devastating two-flank assault from the Left and the Right.
Although his situation is even more desperate than that. In Gorton, Labour collapsed to third place because they were subject to a pincer movement that saw the Greens capturing liberal, Left-wing voters, while Reform ate into the party’s traditional working-class support.
But next month Starmer will face a third major threat. In a number of councils, Labour’s base of Muslim support is set to fracture, and be hoovered up by a rag-tag coalition of hard-Left and radicalised Islamist insurgents.
Starmer will ‘scare Labour MPs with the prospect of an Angela Rayner premiership’, writes Dan Hodges
The Prime Minister serves up tea at Newton Leys Pavilion in Milton Keynes during his pre-election campaign
In Birmingham, for example, a deal has been forged between pro-Gaza campaigners, community campaigners and disaffected former Labour officials and councillors to run a slate to take over the council. As one of the organisers told the Birmingham Mail newspaper candidly: ‘Our objective is to finish off the Labour Party.’
Thanks to Keir Starmer they may well get their wish. The collapse of the party’s vote to Reform would have been enough. But the additional haemorrhaging of votes to the Greens means Labour are now facing historically catastrophic losses. And when the disintegration of bedrock Muslim support is piled on top, it becomes nothing less than an existential political crisis for Starmer’s party.
But the Prime Minister still seems to be in denial over the electoral Armageddon bearing down upon him. He genuinely does seem to think the losses can simply be shrugged off with a promise of another fifty quid off energy bills, a dozen more breakfast clubs and a couple of carefully calibrated digs at Donald Trump.
And as he is about to learn the hard way, they cannot. Labour aren’t confronting 1999 Blairite apathy but the white fury of voters who want Starmer gone, and are prepared to vote for more or less anyone who will help push him towards the Downing Street exit.
Scotland. Wales. The Red Wall. London. Everywhere you look – or everywhere Keir Starmer looks when he wakes up on May 8 – Labour is facing oblivion. And no amount of deftly spun distraction will be able to minimise or deflect from that reality.
Keir Starmer is confident he can survive next month’s local elections. The British people have other ideas.
