Amid the cacophony of post-election analysis over the weekend, one item struck me as especially bleak for Rishi Sunak. It wasn’t the byelection defeat or the seismic swing away from the Tories. It wasn’t even in a news programme. It was an advert.
“Britain hasn’t been so great of late,” says a pastiche scientist. “Economical, societal and sporting performance has dropped.” The reason: not enough Weetabix.
Why is this so bad for Sunak? Breakfast habits do not dictate national wellbeing. But consumer brands strive for political neutrality for fear of alienating customers. Weetabix wouldn’t run a marketing campaign claiming Britain feels down in the dumps if that were a provocative assertion. But it is uncontroversial. And if it barely even counts as a political statement to say the country feels rubbish, the government presiding over the slump is in serious trouble.
The Weetabix index is supported by opinion polls. In a recent survey by More in Common, a civil society organisation, voters were asked to describe the UK in a word. The top choices were “broken”, “mess”, “struggling”, “divided”, “expensive”, “poor” and “chaotic”.
Labour is shrewdly exploiting the mood. The party has launched a digital campaign based on a spoof streaming service, Conflix, showcasing episodes of scandal and incompetence. A general election is pitched as the season finale – a chance to end “14 long years” of Tory “chaos and decline”.
It is effective because the premise is secure. The gloom is common to voters from different parts of the country and very different backgrounds. That means they also might have incompatible views on what needs to be done differently. Pessimism is good for dissolving incumbent power, but not great as an adhesive, binding people to any replacement government. In the gaps where enthusiasm for Labour is hard to discern, the Tories forage for solace.
The prime minister has seized on one polling device that extrapolates last week’s results into national vote shares (Labour 35%; Tories 26%) and feeds those numbers into a hypothetical general election. The outcome is a hung parliament.
It could happen, although the model inflates the likelihood by ignoring Scotland and assuming that Liberal Democrats and Greens will do as well in a national ballot as they do in local contests. Even if smaller parties surge at a general election, most of the energy will be tactically directed to inflict maximum harm on the Tories.
Labour is winning big on a relatively humble vote-share percentage by knowing exactly where it needs the biggest swings, and who will turn out on the day. There are many subplots in last week’s results, but the big story was a tale of Keir Starmer’s method working. More precisely, it was a vindication of the strategic focus brought by Morgan McSweeney and Pat McFadden, the campaign director and coordinator respectively.
The centrality of data-heavy vote-mining to Starmer’s operation is often cited by critics as a symptom of shallowness. The charge is that Labour is bundling an insipid leader over the line with a flimsily stitched electoral coalition that will unravel as soon as it snags on the sharp end of government.
That analysis gets traction because it comes from two angles. It is a comfort for Tories who want to believe they will get back in the game quickly post-defeat. And it is the lament of a disgruntled left that sees itself as the custodian of the Labour soul, resents its marginalisation by Starmer and presumes that any victory bought at a Faustian price must be followed by damnation.
The crucial item of polling evidence in belittling Labour’s prospects is the opposition leader’s lacklustre personal ratings. Starmer is nowhere near as popular as Tony Blair was on the eve of his 1997 landslide victory, nor even as well-liked as David Cameron in 2010, and he failed to secure an outright majority. Britain might be poised for regime change, but it won’t come in a surge of Starmermania.
Comparison with past candidacies has limited value. When a long-serving prime minister leaves a lasting impression on the country, hindsight bias projects that influence further back than it actually goes. Britain was not a very Thatcherite place before 1979. Definitions of Blairism, whether positive or pejorative, are derived from choices made in government, not opposition.
The test for the current Labour leader isn’t whether he is more charismatic than spirits of politics past, but whether he is preferred by present-day voters to his nearest rival. He passes that test, and the Tories, in denial of the real causes of their unpopularity, might choose someone even less electable than Sunak as his successor.
Leaders in bygone contests also set an impossibly high bar. Public esteem for politics is lower than it was when Blair and Cameron were in their pomp. Allegiance is more commonly set by negative partisanship – voting to obstruct the most disliked candidate.
For many Tories, Boris Johnson is the exemplar of a high-charisma candidate whose 2019 triumph expressed public affection. In reality, he went into that contest with approval ratings lower than Theresa May had in 2017, just before she threw away a majority. Johnson owed his victory more to impatience with Brexit stalemate and aversion to Jeremy Corbyn than any talismanic “Boris effect”. His subsequent downfall was from a lower ledge than his cheerleaders recall. It also helped discredit cavalier showmanship as a mode of government.
In a disillusioned political climate where big pledges are disbelieved and grand visions are discounted, Starmer’s lack of pizzazz could even be an asset. If the national mood is defined by fatigue and mistrust of glib gimmicks, there is space for a leader who embodies dogged ordinariness – politics without the hectoring hard sell.
Starmer’s critics lament the modesty of his ambition, but the portion size of his promises is set by a shrunken public appetite. “He’s boring,” one former Conservative voter, now undecided, recently said of the opposition leader in a focus group. “But maybe boring is what we need right now.” It is a familiar refrain.
The winning coalition that Labour is assembling might be disparate and ideologically incoherent, but in collective readiness for dull government without the cacophony and chaos, Britain is more Starmerite than it is anything else right now.
Impatience for radical upheaval and a taste for soaring rhetoric are markers of activist-level engagement in politics. That is a niche audience. It underestimates the appeal of a blandly wholesome candidate, and it would be a mistake to market Starmer as anything else. If he were a breakfast cereal, he probably would be Weetabix. There are worse things to serve up to a country that is sick of more pungent political flavours.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist