Every Labour member wants Labour to do well tonight and for the elections to help push the Tories closer to defeat. In a short while we will know how Labour has done.
Whatever the outcome of the elections, this week has been a frustrating one for those observing Labour’s handling of the Tories’ push-back over partygate. What the Tory press has called beergate - the argument over Keir Starmer’s campaign stop in Durham during last year’s elections – has disrupted the Labour party’s national messaging for most of the final few days of campaigning.
If beergate is a portent of the general election, the way the party handled the row shows Labour’s approach needs an overhaul.
Keir Starmer started the week on the Today programme struggling to answer questions, failing repeatedly to say whether Durham police had been back in touch over the Durham story. Yet on Good Morning Britain the following day he confirmed the police had not contacted him.
Keir Starmer’s non-answers on Tuesday helped the story to run and allowed opponents to be present him as shifty or hiding something. Even after the Today programme, the matter could have been cleared up more quickly than it was.
To the extent that there has been polling on the issue, the indications are that the public have not changed their view that the Labour leader abided by the pandemic rules. 42% (+2 from Jan) thought Keir Starmer generally did abide by the rules as opposed to 28% who thought he generally didn’t (YouGov 3/5/22). Boris Johnson, meanwhile, is still seen as a rulebreaker: 21% (+4) though he had followed the rules and 70% (-3) thought not.
But the purpose of these attacks is not simply to shift public opinion: it’s function is also to barge your opponents’ own messaging out of the way so that they are forced to spend their air-time talking about anything other than their own priority. As an exercise in crowding out Labour’s final week messaging, it was quite effective.
And this kind of attack is also designed to tie down your opponents and absorb their time - sending them off to trawl over their previous answers for errors or weaknesses, checking to see what other lines of attack might come next and so on.
Just as the party was being hampered by the offensive over Durham, Tuesday’s Times had been briefed by allies and supporters of the Labour leader, strategists and senior sources, that a purge of left wing Labour MPs was necessary. Either this was part of a deliberate messaging strategy for election week, which would be wild, or it demonstrated reckless message indiscipline – this time a damaging self-imposed diversion from the party’s main messaging. Neither explanation is satisfactory.
Whilst allies of the leadership chose to attack Labour MPs, Labour’s attack on the Tories sometimes seemed reticent. An underlying problem in the Labour leader’s Today interview was that he did not mention the words Tory or Conservative once.
During his leadership campaign, Keir Starmer pledged “forensic, effective opposition to the Tories in Parliament – linked up to our mass membership and a professional election operation.” Specifically, as the Observer reported, “he was planning to create a dedicated ‘attack and rebuttal’ unit within the party’s media team, as part of party restructuring designed to improve Labour’s fightback against the Tory administration.”
Writing in the Daily Mirror he said, “I want to see a properly deployed Attack and Rebuttal Unit that lays bare every single Tory failure.”
Unfortunately that scale of operation has not been built.
Nonetheless, regardless of the election outcomes, the final week of the campaign should persuade the Labour party that it needs to review how it handles messaging and attack (both ways).