Why Keir Starmer is finding it hard to be comfortably ahead of Boris Johnson

The Labour party could be doing much better by public opinion, but that’s a lot harder than it sounds

Blair was able to ride that wave optimism as it crashed over the dying fag end of a Tory administration (Getty Images)

I am a little bored with hearing that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party should be doing better in the polls. It has become a tired old trope to use the 25th anniversary of Tony Blair’s landslide to contrast his performance with Labour in 2022.

The Partygate revelations only give critics of Starmer more reason to whinge: surely, surely he should be doing better, they say. That the circumstances today are different from 1997 barely needs restating, but the most important aspect is worth spelling out.

In the mid-1990s there were lots of reasons to be optimistic about our future. We were coming out of recession, there was a cultural explosion of creativity, and a truce had been secured in Northern Ireland – to name but three.

Blair was able to ride that wave optimism as it crashed over the dying fag end of a Tory administration. Things really could only get better. This is palpably not the case today. I spend a lot of time talking to normal voters and they don’t believe things can only get better – in fact, broadly, they think things can only get sh*tter.

And who can blame them? The shadow cast by Covid is a long one. The cost of living is rocketing to dangerous levels. Inflation is doing likewise. There is a ground war in mainland Europe. The nation’s finances are a horrible mess.

This is the huge challenge facing Labour. Not only does Starmer need to persuade voters he is a possible prime minister, but he also that he has the capacity to deliver reforms that will make a difference to their lives.

I think he has achieved the first part. But in today’s circumstances the second is very, very hard. When you talk to voters about big ideas that Labour might attempt to deliver, all too often they don’t buy them. Not because they hate the ideas themselves, or Labour for proposing them, but because they really don’t think they will be deliverable or make any tangible difference.

"It’s a nice idea, but..."

Take the windfall tax as an example. Long before Boris Johnson U-turned on it, Starmer had been pushing it, so we asked voters about it. And, sadly, although the people understood the idea of such a tax and liked it, the response was mainly “meh”. A participant in one of our focus groups described it as a “word salad” and “throwing a load of words on a sheet”.

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This is the problem – there is a deep-seated cynicism about the capacity of any government to deliver anything tangible for normal people. And it’s quite understandable: life at the moment is tough and getting tougher. A failure to deliver on Brexit is another example – the failure to deliver £350m for the NHS has not just damned Tory Brexiteers, it has damned all politicians.

“They’re all the same…” is a phrase you hear time and time again.

This is the challenge to Starmer’s people. It won’t be enough to persuade voters that Johnson is doing a bad job – that is now accepted – nor that the Labour Leader could and, perhaps, should be PM – as I say, that job is pretty much done too.

The final piece of the jigsaw is to persuade people that there really is a sunlit upland – and that Kier Starmer is the man to lead us to it. And that’s the really tough bit.