Starmer's Gameplan
The real reason the Prime Minister wants to take the fight to Nigel Farage
This lunchtime saw a travelling circus of lobby journalists almost miss the Prime Minister’s big speech in the North West. Their train trundling towards St Helens at one point simply decided to stop moving. Hacks resorted to buddying up and sharing cabs, at least one of which took the wrong route and had to make a screeching u-turn. Insert your own political metaphors here.
After a Number 10 press officer offered to “literally run” a group of extremely late journalists to the factory hanger containing a rather lonely Prime Minister, Westminster’s finest arrived on the scene with seconds to spare.
What greeted them was a new political reality.
Keir Starmer has taken it upon himself to declare that there is a new leader of the opposition. Not the woman leading 120 MPs, or the human waterslide leading 72, but the Honourable Member for Clacton and his merry band of five.
In this speech to assembled journalists and factory workers, Sir Keir mentioned Nigel Farage by name an average of once every minute.
But what is the game plan here? Have Downing Street strategists, struck down by horror after the local elections, seen the writing the wall and mounted an all hands on deck ‘stop Farage’ campaign? Far from it. Their wacky races trip to St Helens saw journalists witness the birth of a new tactic. Far from attempting to stop Nigel, Sir Keir is doing precisely the opposite.
Reform has enjoyed a remarkable rise. Their professionalisation has been rapid. The party is making smart calls on party discipline, and is avoiding falling into the Very Online traps that are so often so tempting for less established organisations. Above it all, however, they have one enormous advantage; everyone feels like the country is going to the dogs, and Reform are the only major modern party that hasn’t been in government.
At a certain point in politics, the strong horse effect kicks in.1 Winning begets winning, and a commanding position in the polls makes voters take you more seriously as a political force. Rinse and repeat. It happened with Trump, it happened for a time with Corbyn, and now it’s happening with Reform too. The more they win, the more they win.
But what the polling average chart above shows us is not just the remarkable rise of the Reform Party, there are two other crucial elements to examine:
What a long time we have until the next general election.
Gosh that’s a larger number of squiggly lines than we usually care to look at.
In an era of five party politics, you can’t simply win a Parliamentary majority by being the most popular party. You also can’t risk being too unpopular. Keir Starmer could win a massive majority on 33.7% of the vote, but Theresa May lost hers on 42.3%. Why? It’s not just about the coalition you build to support your party, it’s what coalition might be built elsewhere that is minded to oppose it.
More strident or unpopular politicians are more likely to act as a lightening rod to focus the minds of their opposition. The genius of the bland and boring bollard that was Keir Starmer in 2024 was that he was too inoffensive for a ‘stop Starmer’ scare campaign to work. This meant he could win on small pluralities, with a scattered opposition.
Theresa May lost thirteen seats and her majority in 2017, despite winning 2,301,958 more votes than David Cameron won two years earlier. Again, it’s not the share of the vote you win that matters under first past the post - it’s the gap between yourself and your next nearest opponent.
The seeming inevitability of Theresa May’s looming supermajority, and her weak and wobbly campaign led to a significant coalescence around her primary opponent. Labour was able to sufficiently scare enough voters to coalescing around the official opposition to stop the nasty Tories and their nasty Dementia Tax.
Today, strategists in Number 10 clearly have struck upon a similar strategy. What’s their plan? Earlier this week, political economist Ben Ansell drew a delightful literary analogy. Highlighting how the Reform Party are now often grazing 30% in the polls, he wrote:
In our new Lilliputian era, where political parties struggle to amass a quarter of the vote, this makes them the Gulliver.
What remains to be seen is whether Gulliver can, as in his Tales, be tied down by down by Britain’s legion of minor parties, which now includes such well-known crowd favourites as ‘the Conservative Party’ and ‘the Labour Party’. Memba’ them?
Keir Starmer today is attempting to become that Lilliputian. He knows his own favourability ratings are in the sewer, but he believes when push comes to shove the highly tactical Lib Dem and Green voters of this world are more likely to hold their noses and vote for a particularly pungent Starmer - if that means keeping an even more noxious Nigel out of Number 10.
Labour has given up on popularity. They are now aiming to cauterise their wounds, become less generally offensive, and force a fractured electorate a choice between two parties - and thereby become the less odious option for a workable plurality.
In some ways this is proportional representation thinking in a first past the post system. They are just attempting to force voters into doing the difficult coalition negotiations to keep the radical right out of power on the day of the election, rather than after it.
To this end it is entirely in the interests of Keir Starmer to big Nigel Farage up as much as he possible. To blow the bellows beneath his fire, and create the biggest bogeyman he can. To turn Farage into the Gulliver that Lilliput can then work together to tie down.
The next election will take shape as the incumbent Prime Minister vs a challenger. No matter how many parties demand to be in a multi party televised debate, Keir Starmer will demand to face down Nigel Farage one on one - and Farage will be only too delighted to accept.
That’s the thing about this strategy. It helps both Nigel Farage and Keir Starmer. Each man wants to lead a top two party. Each man wants the largest coalition possible behind him. And Starmer believes he has the edge.
YouGov may well this week put Nigel’s Reform eight points clear of the second place Labour Party - but Farage is still behind Starmer on the polling question Ed Miliband always failed, even when leading in the polls. Who do Britons think would make the best Prime Minister? On that, YouGov gives Starmer a 15 point lead.
Just as David Cameron was able to convince many waverers in 2015 to hold their noses and vote Tory to keep the spectre of the Miliband-SNP coalition out of power, Keir Starmer is attempting to do the same today with the spectre of Reform.
In Runcorn, the dramatic Parliamentary by election Reform took by just six votes, the Labour Party had already stated to dip their toe in this strategy. Sending party activists to traditionally Tory areas, the more well to do parts of the constituency, to squeeze the nervous centrist Tories. Meanwhile Reform swept up on the council estates.
To be clear, this is not a foolproof strategy for Starmer. It requires detoxifying his Labour Party - which clearly starts with embarrassing and expensive u-turns on benefits to pensioners and parents alike. But herein lies the tightrope. Over the next four years Starmer has to not only shift from being hated to being merely disliked, meanwhile he has to oversee meaningful standard of living improvements for the wider country.
Often being loved and being economically rational are diametrically opposing goals.
There is a long way to go before the next general election. But just eleven months until significant legislative elections in Scotland and Wales. Already we have seen Scottish First Minister John Swinney take on the Starmer tactic and declare next week’s Scottish Parliamentary by election in Hamilton a “straight contest” between the SNP and Reform UK. Clearly the bogeyman tactic is working in their focus groups too.
So look out for more ‘It’s me vs Nigel’ over the next four years. At this point Labour has given up on every other path to clinging on to power. And don’t expect Nigel Farage to mind one single bit. This Keir vs Nigel strategy is quite possibly his best shot at power too.
I wrote about the Strong Horse theory of politics in a slightly different context in The Ghost of Clem.