Opinion: In Britain, the lukewarm labour landslide is coming

(CNN) — Britain’s Labour Party is not an especially successful electoral venture. In its 118 years of existence, the Labour Party has been in power for only 33 years. Since the Second World War, Labour has had only three election winners — Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair.

To their number it may soon be right to add Sir Keir Starmer. There is too little time left for the Conservative Party to recover, and the Labour poll lead remains stubbornly too high.

Indeed, a landslide victory appears to be at hand, and here is where we encounter the first notable difference with Tony Blair’s first electoral victory in 1997.

The metaphor of the landslide suggests a rockfall, a spectacular collapse as erosion defeats the land mass. It sounds exciting and it tempts us to think that there must be a great deal of enthusiasm for the new formation.

But there is no law of politics that says a party cannot win handsomely while giving away little of what it will do and without inspiring any great affection. All it takes is for the public to want to draw the curtain on 14 years of Conservative government that has descended from tragedy into farce.

This election will be a rare event, to be sure. At previous elections, when one party has fallen apart (1979 and 2019 for Labour against Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson respectively, and in the Blair years 1997 until 2005 for the Conservatives), the other party has appeared ready for office.

In 1997, the Blair government came to power with a following wind of enthusiasm which seems absent in the case of the putative Starmer government. Why might this be? Of course it is impossible to avoid a comparison of the characters of the two leaders.

Blair embodied a changed Labour Party. He looked and sounded different from his predecessors, and his appeal to voters who had never before come to the Labour Party was effortless. Starmer is a much less natural politician of the center–ground. He comes from the soft left part of the Labour Party and there is a learned quality to his recent political shifts.

But there are always reasons why parties end up with the leaders they do. In a sense, a leader is a summary of the sort of party that Labour is in 2024, and that is a very different time and place from 1997.

In 1997 Tony Blair had been leader of the Labour Party for three years and had never been behind in the opinion polls. The reputation of the Conservative government for economic competence collapsed on Black Wednesday, 16 September, 1992 and never recovered.

However, by the time of the general election in May 1997, the British economy had recovered. Growth was back and there were projections of buoyant tax revenues, which did indeed make the early days of the Blair government a good deal easier.

Blair also benefited from the work done by his predecessors as Labour leader, Neil Kinnock and John Smith, in purging the party of its left-wing elements and beginning the process of reviewing policy.

Starmer enjoys none of these advantages. He is, as he often says, trying to do alone in one term what it took Kinnock, Smith and Blair four terms to achieve.

His tenure as Labour leader has been remarkable, by any standards. Starmer took on the leadership in 2020 after predecessor Jeremy Corbyn led Labour to its worst electoral defeat since 1935. On the day of his appointment Labour trailed Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party by more than 20 points.

Not long afterwards, the nation went into pandemic lockdown and Starmer was leading from a sealed room. It has been a difficult time, and it has only recently become the conventional wisdom that Starmer is going to be the next prime minister.

Blair had years to work out a policy program, which was always taken seriously because he was widely expected to be in power. Starmer struggled for a while to attract the funding and the staff needed to create a viable program for government.

I recall, during the 2005 general election campaign, in which Labour won a third consecutive victory, albeit with a much reduced majority, Tony Blair asking me how I thought Bury was going. The town of Bury in northwest England – where my family lived – was a political weathervane. It was the sort of place that settled the election. The demographic composition of the town — once industrial but slowly emerging as a service economy — meant that Bury almost always voted for the party that won the election.

I said that Bury looked solid for Labour but that it would not be easy. More campaigners were sent to the town and Labour held on.

In 2024, the two seats in Bury look set to go from Conservative to Labour in a landslide in each. The nation is clearly not frightened by the prospect of a Starmer government, even if there is no evidence of great affection.

Yet politics in Britain is a two-horse race, and if one horse is lame, the other one wins, perhaps by a long stretch. It’s a novel situation and Starmer, with his lukewarm landslide, will be a pioneer.

It may be that he has the momentum to win well but lacks the goodwill on which governments rely, especially when times are hard as, sadly, they will be.

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