‘No celebrating’: Keir Starmer’s next steps to No 10

As the results of the local elections came in on Friday, Sir Keir Starmer studied them closely for clues about whether he was on course to be Britain’s next prime minister. “Keir was in a good mood all day,” one witness said. “But he’s been writing copious notes on the results and his plans for what comes next.”

Labour gained about 200 council seats while the Tories lost close to 500 and were overtaken by Liberal Democrats in the number of council seats for the first time since 1996. Starmer was studying the detail of swings and vote shares in areas across the country that he will need to win if Labour is to form a majority at the general election. “He’ll go to shadow cabinet and the PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party] and do the whole ‘no complacency’ thing,” an aide said. “You don’t need to tell Keir to stay focused. He’s like a football manager with five games to go in the title race, doing the quick fist pump to the crowd, then getting down the tunnel. No celebrating at this stage.”

Starmer was watching football when he got wind that the mayoral election in the West Midlands, where Andy Street was trying to hold on for Tories, might deliver the signature victory of the weekend for Labour. Starmer had suggested a pit stop on Saturday at a Midlands pub showing his beloved Arsenal’s game against Bournemouth.

Over a light lunch, Starmer watched his team keep up the pressure on Manchester City in their title race and prepared to head back to London. But when news came that Labour had outperformed their own expectations, Starmer decided he would hang on in the Midlands “just in case”. An aide said: “We weren’t expecting a result there so it wasn’t in the schedule, but the man just doesn’t rest”.

Labour strategists knew they had been hurt by bankruptcy at the Labour-run Birmingham council and a decline in their Muslim vote over Starmer’s stance on the war in Gaza. That vote migrated to George Galloway’s Workers Party, so the West Midlands result was doubly sweet.

Nationwide, Labour made gains in places where they need to win seats at the general election, such as Hartlepool and Redditch. A favourite win of Labour’s chief strategist Morgan McSweeney was Rushmoor, the seat that includes Aldershot. “Sunak tried pushing defence spending and security as an election issue and now he’s lost the home of the British Army,” a Labour official crowed. Another was the mayoral election in York & North Yorkshire, Rishi Sunak’s backyard. “I have a lot of respect for the Tory machine but they didn’t see that coming. We sent Keir and Rachel [Reeves] and they still didn’t put money in,” the official added.

The swing to Labour in the Tees Valley, while not enough to unseat the Tory incumbent Ben Houchen, was big enough for Labour to reclaim every parliamentary seat in that red wall heartland. “We were competing there not because we thought we could win the mayoralty [but] to rebuild support in the battleground seats. On that swing we would have won every single seat there and we’d have won some in France and Germany too!”

However, Labour’s advance was not unstoppable. In the council elections, they got a 34 per cent national equivalent share of the vote, one point down on their performance a year ago. Harlow, which Starmer visited in the past week in the expectation that the council would fall, remained Tory-controlled.

The good news for Labour supporters is that Starmer and McSweeney seem determined to keep learning from their mistakes and weaknesses. Indeed, some party officials are glad there were some disappointments. “The natural instinct of the Labour Party is to veer between calamity and total complacency,” one aide said. “You don’t want people thinking it’s all done and dusted. We need to remind people that if you want to get rid of this government you have to vote Labour.”

When Labour surprisingly lost the by-election last year in Uxbridge & South Ruislip, Boris Johnson’s old seat, McSweeney conducted a top-to-bottom review of the Labour election machine. Insiders say he will hold a stock-take meeting with Starmer early this week and look at everything the election data is saying to help decide messaging and where they need to deploy resources in the months ahead.

Provisional analysis by Labour’s data team shows that their share of the vote is now much more efficiently distributed than under Corbyn, when the party tended to stack up votes in places where it was already strong rather than in marginal constituencies. “We were poor at putting together coalitions to win,” a Labour source said. “In 2019 if we had beaten the Tories by 12 per cent we would have got a majority of one, because of where our votes were. One of the key things we wanted to achieve when Keir became leader was to change that.

“We thought we could change that with two types of voters: one is non-graduate voters in England; two is in Scotland. We think this week’s results show we’ve got the breadth of support to win across the country. Because of voter efficiency, the winning line is no longer a 12-point lead, it is much lower.”

‘They must be innumerate’

For Sunak the most important moment, when he was effectively declared safe as the leader of the Conservative Party, was around noon on Friday, when it became clear that Houchen had won, albeit with a reduced majority. That morning, one of the leading rebels in a plot to replace the prime minister contacted journalists and said: “Houchen is the decider, for better or worse.”

In fact, the plotters in the self-styled Conservative Britain Alliance had met three weeks ago at an office in Soho and decided there were three tripwires that had to be triggered to set off a new onslaught against the prime minister. Houchen and Andy Street would have to lose and the Tories come in third behind Reform in the Blackpool South by-election.

In the event, the Conservatives held on to second in Blackpool by 117 votes and by mid-afternoon on Friday Labour was conceding defeat to Street.

At that meeting three weeks ago, the rebels decided that they would “pull our punches” if all three tripwires were not triggered. A series of stories revealing decisions Sunak has made in government, which would damage him with the Tory right and were likely to include his decisions on immigration, have now been shelved.

Key figures on the right decided they did not really have a candidate to replace Sunak and that they did not really trust Penny Mordaunt, who had emerged as the frontrunner. Nonetheless, Mordaunt and her most determined outriders continued to have meetings, as we reported last weekend, to stitch together an agreement which would have gone into motion if the results had been worse for Sunak. Now the rebels have decided Sunak should “own” the expected general election defeat.

Labour strategists are baffled by the decision of the Tory rebels. “They must be innumerate,” a Starmer aide said. “If you look at the difference between the police and crime commissioner vote and the Street vote in Birmingham you can see what a drag Sunak is on the ticket for them. If they’re paying attention to the numbers, they should be getting rid of him. The guy’s a loser.”

Even Houchen, a close ally of Johnson, is no great fan of Sunak. When the prime minister flew to the Tees Valley for a victory rally, the body language between them was awkward and Houchen said he “forgot” to wear a blue rosette. He then issued a statement saying he would “absolutely” work with a prime minister Starmer. “Ben was putting as much distance between them as possible,” a minister said. “Apparently he was pissed off that Rishi turned up at all.”

Street too ran on a personal ticket with no mentions of Sunak on his literature. “Andy absolutely despises him,” a minister said. A former No 10 aide explained: “When Rishi was chancellor, Andy found him haughty, arrogant, patronising and dismissive when he wanted money for things.” Street, so far, has not publicly rounded on the prime minister, despite threatening to resign in a blaze of fury over Sunak’s decision to cancel the second leg of HS2.

In London, where Susan Hall lost to Khan but by far less than the 22 per cent YouGov was predicting with two days to go, insiders criticised the choice of candidate, who was widely regarded as a maverick and on the extreme right of the party in what is a left-wing city. One cabinet minister said: “Khan was there for the taking. It’s unforgiveable.” But a party source said: “We can’t choose people who don’t want to do it.”

Straw-clutching exercise

In Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ), the election director Isaac Levido and his team found some crumbs of comfort in the idea that Labour’s lead is lower when the public cast real votes, as opposed to answering opinion poll questions. Labour won the national equivalent vote by 34 per cent to 27, a seven-point lead, when most opinion polls show them 20 to 25 points ahead of the Tories.

A senior Tory source seized on this data as evidence that the nation is on course for a hung parliament rather than the landslide shown by successive MRP superpolls. “These local election results raise serious questions about the ability of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party to seal the deal and achieve a majority at the general election — meaning Britain is on course for a rainbow coalition with Starmer propped up in Downing Street by the SNP, Liberal Democrats and the Greens,” the source said.

“These key mayoral contests were a major test for Labour. They focused all their national campaigning efforts on them, they spent significantly with direct mail, deployed huge numbers of activists, and Keir Starmer personally put himself front and centre in all of them. Despite all these efforts, the West Midlands was a virtual dead heat and Labour lost Tees Valley.

The source also argued that big by-election wins by Labour and the Lib Dems were “consequence free” because the government would remain the same. “As soon as the stakes go up, as soon as voters have the chance to put Labour in charge of something like in Tees Valley and the West Midlands — real jobs with real consequences — they shy away and refuse to give Starmer’s Labour Party conclusive backing.

“Outside of an election period, polls are the reins on the horse that the electorate use to guide the government. And MRP predictions, which are modelled versions of opinion polling, therefore contain the same fundamental error in analysis. Forecasts based on actual votes show a very different story.”

However, even cabinet ministers are sceptical about this straw-clutching exercise. The near-deranged optimism of one local Tory aide in London, who created a bubble of nonsense on social media on Friday suggesting that Hall might actually beat Khan — a claim which was contradicted by both Labour and Tory strategists in private — was actively damaging.

Labour strategists were also surprised that some Conservatives began talking up the chances of Ben Bradley, who was challenging to be mayor of the East Midlands. Labour’s Claire Ward won by more than 50,000 votes in an area that includes several red-wall seats Labour wants to regain.

With Labour firm favourites to win, Tory strategists have identified a “squeeze message” which they can target at 2019 Tory voters who are uneasy about what Starmer would do in power: “Don’t let them get a landslide.” The same message worked for Labour in 2017, when voters who did not expect or want Jeremy Corbyn to win nonetheless backed Labour in order to clip Theresa May’s wings and prevent a big majority. In the event, the Tories fell short of a majority and Corbyn was only a few seats from forming a government.

At Labour HQ in Southwark, some of the London results suggested that the binary choice between Sunak or Starmer as prime minister could have the opposite effect. Sadiq Khan notably picked up votes from former Lib Dem backers in southwest London. “It’s clear that the prospect of Tories sneaking a win will focus the minds of left-leaning voters to support Labour. Lib Dems down there must have really swung for Sadiq,” a source said.

By contrast, having a right-wing Tory candidate in Hall did not stem support for Reform UK. The party, led by Richard Tice, failed to push the Tories into third place in Blackpool South and their vote share of 17 per cent was much lower than Ukip used to achieve in similar circumstances. Experts say you would expect a party polling as it is nationally to score around 27 per cent in a prominent by-election. That said, Reform is taking far more votes from the Tories than Ukip did, which also leeched a sizeable number of votes from Labour, so its capacity to hurt the Conservatives is magnified.

All of which makes it more intriguing that allies of Johnson and Nigel Farage have recently been in contact to discuss a possible realignment of the right after a general election. Johnson has recently said that he is considering when the time might be right to re-enter the frontline political fray. His team denied claims that he has recently talked directly to Farage and stressed that he had voted Tory on Thursday, but it is understood there have been communications between the camps.

One scenario under consideration would see Farage fight and win Clacton in Essex for Reform. Johnson would likely fight a by-election in the next couple of years, if whoever replaces Sunak fails to make headway, and then help to woo Farage to rejoin the Conservatives.

A spokesman for Johnson said: “Boris Johnson’s number one priority is campaigning for Ukrainian victory and lasting peace. He is focused on that. He is also writing a book and speaking.” The statement made no mention of helping Sunak to win an election.

All of which, taken together, means that Tories seem on course to lose, with Sunak at the helm; Labour is making enough progress to win a majority, but perhaps not yet the landslide that has been widely predicted; and that if Starmer seeks re-election in 2028-9 he will be facing yet another Tory leader.

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