Voters deserve better than ‘safety-first’ Starmer

Even the staunchest Conservative has to admit that the election campaign didn’t get off to the greatest of starts, but in the end it’s how you finish an election campaign, not how you begin it, that matters. Just ask Theresa May. She blew a 20-point lead in the polls and had the 2017 election campaign last another week, Britain may well have “welcomed” Jeremy Corbyn into Number 10. Things can change.

Admittedly, the Prime Minister has the fight of his political life on his hands if he is to turn things round, but the last two days may give him and his campaign strategists a fig leaf of hope.

Political commentators are always asked by interviewers like me: “So who won the campaign today?” Labour undoubtedly won the first three days of the campaign after elementary mistakes were made by the Conservative events team. But Rishi Sunak grabbed back the initiative on Sunday with his National Service policy pledge. Whatever you think of it, no one has been talking about anything else for the last 48 hours. And that matters. No one’s talking about Labour.

The hope among Tory supporters and candidates will be that there are a whole host of eye-catching, or even risky, policy announcements being planned for the coming days, which continue to put Labour on the back foot and inject some much-needed momentum. George H W Bush described it as “The Big Mo”.

This is where the two TV debates are going to be so crucial to Tory election chances, assuming they garner huge audiences. If Keir Starmer continues his “Ming Vase” policy of being the most safety-first oriented politician since Stanley Baldwin, it’s possible that the electorate will become bored with him and his non-committal approach to everything.

Whenever Starmer gives an evasive answer Sunak should just turn to him, look him in the eye and ask: “Is that it?” Sunak will hope that it’s not possible for Starmer to get through a six-week election campaign without being found out. In essence, Sunak has to force him to drop the Ming Vase.

There is a strong sense of disenchantment among voters, with polls revealing many still “don’t know” where to lend their support, and they deserve better than Labour’s current approach. It’s all very well being cautious, but surely you can’t go through an entire campaign, say nothing, and expect to be rewarded for it. Safety first will have its appeal, but if your campaign slogan is “Change” then you do have to be able to explain what you want to change to and how you’re going to achieve it.

You have to give some indication of what the sunlit uplands are going to look like. What Sarah Palin referred to as the “hopey changey thing”, can only take you so far, particularly if you have very little to back it up with. And this is where Tory strategists spot an opening. Or they should.

At the margins

The result of this election may well be decided by the performance of the minor parties like Reform UK, the Greens and George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain. I don’t expect they will win more than half a handful of seats between them, but the amount of votes they rack up in different constituencies could tip the balance between a hung parliament and a large Labour majority.

On the right, if Reform UK take enough Conservative votes in Red Wall seats, even ones with relatively large Conservative majorities, it could let Labour in to take the seats. Similarly in the south of England they could perform the same service for the Liberal Democrats. On the Left, there are plenty of Left-wing voters who cannot stomach Starmer’s volte-faces on policy and his drift to what they see as the Right. They may well be tempted to register a protest by voting Green or for the Workers Party. In some marginal seats these votes may be enough to see the Tories retain some surprise seats, especially in the North West.

National divide

One reason I was very happy to learn of the announcement on National Service was because it put the defence of this country front and centre of the election campaign, which is exactly where it needs to be. The head of the Army was right when he warned that we should see ourselves as the pre-war generation. And he was right to warn about the size of our Armed Forces. We must not make the same mistake as the National Government did in the 1930s.

When will Britain learn that, if you try to appease dictators, it comes back to bite you? Rearming and reinforcing our military is not an aggressive measure, it is a necessary one given the threats we now face. For Labour to have stolen a march on defence, with a poll last week revealing Starmer is more trusted by the public on national security than Rishi Sunak, is shaming for the Conservatives. There has never been an occasion in my lifetime where that has happened. Even under Tony Blair the Tories were still more popular on defence than Labour.

I don’t doubt that Keir Starmer and his shadow defence secretary John Healey are patriots and believe in strong defences, but there are too many Labour MPs and members who would happily divert much of the defence budget to pay for goodness knows what. They fail to learn the lessons of history.

Iain Dale’s new book, ‘British General Election Campaigns 1830-2019’, is published by Biteback