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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
At the leaving do to mark the departure of Rav Athwal, the former Treasury official who wrote Labour’s 2024 manifesto, there were speeches by various Cabinet ministers, but it was Ed Miliband who stole the show. He praised Athwal for his role in doing something very few people ever do — writing a manifesto that ends in a Labour victory. The authors of winning Labour manifestos — be they Michael “The Rise of the Meritocracy” Young or, as Miliband reminded his audience, his own brother, David — go on to great things. But they are rare. As Miliband said, he should know: he wrote one losing manifesto, for Gordon Brown in 2010, and was the frontman for another in 2015.
Miliband is not shy about making jokes at his own expense or of taking the time for small gestures of kindness, which helps to explain why, despite his role in two defeats, he is Keir Starmer’s most influential Cabinet minister. (The other reason, which is less flattering for everyone, is that he possesses an all-too-rare commodity around the Cabinet table: a serious grip on what he wants to do with his department and a strong sense of how to do so.)
One driver of the bleak and mutinous mood in and around the Labour government is that, just a year into the party’s time in office, almost everyone believes that the author of Labour’s 2029 manifesto is more likely to end up emulating Miliband, not Athwal. MPs complain that the Downing Street operation has managed to both be overly obsessed with an election four years away (at the expense of focusing on policy in the here and now), while also being on course to lose. As one MP puts it: “We have a wartime consigliere . . . but we’re losing the war.”
Although much of the Starmer government’s policy agenda is very far from Blairite, Labour won a landslide victory a year ago because they rediscovered some of Tony Blair’s old truths, not least the value of his first piece of advice for defeated parties: “Start with an honest analysis of why you are in opposition.”
On this score, Starmer, and his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, came up with an impeccable theory for Labour failure: the party was seen as too radical, unpatriotic and liable to play fast and loose with people’s money. As a result, Starmer’s Labour loudly embraced limitations on what it would do on tax and rarely, if ever, appeared anywhere without a union jack to serve as the backdrop.
But elections aren’t just referendums on the alternative to the incumbent, though it certainly helped the Conservatives in the 2010s that, for much of the past decade and a half, the Labour alternative has been unappealing. They are also defined by what the government of the day did. While Labour under Starmer developed a good theory of why they were in opposition, they never really settled on one about why the Conservatives stayed in office.
That lack of interest in the real meat of policy is part of why the government is now struggling. More focus might have led the party to ask whether it really is a good idea to make quite so many self-denying ordinances on tax?
At a recent meeting in Downing Street, Liz Lloyd, the government’s new policy chief, scandalised some attendees by asking about the party’s wealth taxes and their impact on their growth mission.
This was seen as heretical, since it implied some scepticism about the approach the party took during the campaign. The thought that briefly putting Rishi Sunak in a jam with a pledge on non-doms might, in fact, not be a good trade-off for diminished tax revenues and the UK’s attractiveness as a destination in which to work and invest was not allowed to intrude.
Similarly, the government is pursuing policies on immigration that constrain growth and put further pressure on the country’s ailing social care sector.
And one reason it came unstuck last week over changes to welfare is that it visibly had no policy rationale for them — an absence made worse by the fact that MPs, already fearing for their seats at the next election, had less incentive to go along with the proposals.
Labour’s first year in office has gone so badly because the party never developed a theory for holding office, as opposed to just acquiring it. Time is running out for them to develop one soon enough for it to be of any use this side of the next election.
If they don’t, the author of their next manifesto should start cultivating their own line in self-deprecating jokes now.
