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It was wounding and it was accurate, but was it wise? Keir Starmer, increasingly confident at Prime Minister’s Questions, said of the official opposition that “a once-great political party is sliding into brain-dead oblivion”.
He repeated the line in answer to Kemi Badenoch’s final question: “They are sliding into oblivion; they are a dead party walking.”
In the cruel theatre of the Commons, it was effective, because he put into words what Conservative MPs most fear. They know that if it becomes accepted that the real leader of the opposition is Nigel Farage, there is little that can stop their voters deserting them wholesale at the next election.
The Prime Minister’s focus has been on the threat from Farage since Morgan McSweeney took over from Sue Gray as the Downing Street chief of staff in October. The idea, as my colleague Andrew Grice puts it, is to see the next election as a presidential contest between Starmer and Farage. The plan is to persuade Labour voters to stick with the party, and maybe even to bring over some soft Tories, by presenting Starmer as the less bad option in a forced choice between him and Farage.
That is a dangerous game. But what seems particularly dangerous is to make the strategy explicit, because that builds up Farage and allows him to look as if he is dictating the terms on which the next election is fought.
That is why it was unwise of Starmer, for the sake of a debating-club put-down, to write off the Conservative Party. Instead of trying to spook Tory MPs with the prospect of imminent extinction, he should be trying to prop Badenoch up. After all, it was the division of the right between the Tories and Reform that allowed Labour to win so handsomely at the last election. Uniting the right behind Farage might not end well for Labour.
It may be what is going to happen anyway, of course. Badenoch’s declaration to Welsh Tories yesterday, “our fightback starts here”, may well be mocked by the results of the Senedd election next year. Farage has had his eyes on that election for some time, which is why he launched his general election manifesto last year in Merthyr Tydfil.
In which case, it makes sense for McSweeney to make sure Starmer is ready to compete in a straight fight. But putting that strategy on the outside is like Richard Rogers putting the pipework on the outside of the Lloyd’s building: it looks ugly.
It makes it look as if the Prime Minister’s “island of strangers” speech was just a piece of political positioning. Or, rather, it further reinforces the impression that it is a piece of positioning, given that it was so at odds with what Starmer the human rights lawyer used to say.
There was, incidentally, a striking article in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago by Jamie Burton and Finnian Clarke, barristers in Doughty Street Chambers, the human rights outfit once headed by Starmer. “Labour is at risk not so much of losing control over immigration but the narrative around human rights – one subject the Prime Minister knows better than anyone,” they wrote. “One hopes he will stick up for what he has always believed.”
The danger of openly pursuing the strategy of elbowing the Tories aside for a head-to-head contest with Reform is that it will fuel discontent among Labour MPs. They see it as trying to out-Farage Farage, and again and again I hear the refrain, in private: “I didn’t go into politics for this.”
Instead, Starmer should do what is right, and let the positioning take care of itself. That does not mean different policies, but it means selling them on their merits rather than as a turn to the right. Starmer does try to make the case. Indeed, the “island of strangers” speech was a decent attempt to make the social-democratic argument for reduced immigration.
But if the election strategy is too close to the surface, it makes it harder to get that message across.
It is harder still for Starmer, who is not a natural teacher-politician. He is trying to emulate the success of the Danish social democrats in aligning themselves with public opinion on immigration, but he doesn’t have the style of Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, who recently told The New York Times: “There is a price to pay when too many people enter your society. Those who pay the highest price of this, it’s the working class or lower class in the society. It is not – let me be totally direct – it’s not the rich people. It is not those of us with good salaries, good jobs.”
That is the real argument for detention camps overseas for failed asylum seekers, and for reviewing “right to family life” claims under the European Convention on Human Rights. But because Starmer is too explicit about seeing Farage as his main opponent, it risks getting lost.
In the end, anti-Farage voters, like many Labour MPs, may resent being told that they have nowhere else to go. If the Tories are sliding into oblivion, Starmer needs to be careful that he doesn’t follow them.
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