Whereas last year’s Labour Party Conference was filled with untrammelled optimism, this year there’s a palpable sense of trepidation amid the victory celebrations in Liverpool.
The strict instructions new MPs have been given to ensure they keep out of trouble have contributed to that feeling. Nobody wants to become the conference’s Main Character for speaking out of turn, so soon after being elected.
There’s also the icy plunge into government, with the myriad serious issues that a party in power has to confront. When the Chancellor and Prime Minister talk of tough choices and inevitable unpopularity, it takes some of the spring out of your step.
But there’s also a degree to which the mood can be attributed to the rough ride the party has had in the press in recent weeks. Whether it’s painful battles over cuts to winter fuel payments, the ongoing row over donations in kind received by various frontbenchers, or the nascent spat over economic confidence, Labour MPs and activists alike are feeling somewhat tender from a barrage of difficult headlines.
There are three schools of thought about this.
Loyalists reassure their colleagues that this is just what it’s like for a new government. The scrutiny is harsher and more intense than in opposition, for good reason, and it will take time to adjust from the comparatively easy ride provided by endless Tory psychodramas and pratfalls.
Starmer-sceptics argue that these are real problems of political judgement, mixing personal overconfidence with an overly conservative fiscal policy.
Jeremy Corbyn, one veteran activist said to me on Monday, wouldn’t take flashy suits or leave pensioners in the cold. (The easy rejoinder is that if Corbynism’s monkish asceticism and enthusiasm for government debt was so fantastic, it wouldn’t have led Labour to disaster, whereas Starmer’s smart wardrobe and Reeves’s commitment to balancing the books has delivered electoral triumph.)
There may be some truth in both views, though each should be taken with a pinch of salt given they divide along factional lines.
But the third school of thought about Labour’s recent troubles cuts more widely, and should be of far greater concern to the party: their commuications machine is malfunctioning.
Regardless of whether Starmerites or their critics are right about the source of critical news stories, both agree that when such things happen, the Government’s media team needs to handle them effectively. Even loyalists privately concede that over the summer this has stuttered.
Issues that should be foreseen and headed off are allowed to fester for too long.
For example, the winter fuel decision is now paired with a new campaign to increase the uptake among vulnerable pensioners of pension credit. That’s a useful response for ministers to give when under fire – however, the cut was announced in late July, and the pension credit campaign didn’t launch until 2 September. In the gap, the narrative was set.
Messaging on difficult issues seems inexcusably clumsy. We are now weeks into the donations row, but voters are still being told that what was done was “within the rules” and even that “every MP does it”.
These replies are straight out of the failed response to the MPs’ expenses scandal 15 years ago. They didn’t work then, and they aren’t working now, for the good reason that they display a failure to understand the nature of people’s concerns about the issue. Instead they reinforce the problem.
“This is allowed and we are all at it” is not a helpful reply – and comms professionals should not be sending ministers out to deliver it.
There are also signs that decision-making is just too slow, which is damaging in a fast-moving environment.
For instance, once it emerged that Lady Starmer had received gifts of dresses, it was inevitably going to be a news story – but a press operation at the top of its game should never have allowed her to be photographed the very next day at London Fashion Week looking at designer dresses.
It’s a small thing, but it turned a few paragraphs of black and white newspaper copy into a picture story, which was an unforced error.
She was absent from a London Fashion Week event at Downing Street later that day, where readouts of speeches suggested she was expected to attend – a source told The Telegraph the British Fashion Council had been mistaken in thinking she would be there at all – but by then it was too late.
That suggests the media operation knows what’s a good idea and what’s a bad idea, but something is slowing them down and preventing them putting those instincts to effective use.
My colleagues in the press are prone to over-dramatise, so let’s not overstate this. This is not a crisis. It’s not a disaster. But it is a problem, and the cumulative effect of a misfiring comms operation is attritional.
Each sluggish response or mis-step erodes a little bit of political capital. This government has lots of capital, because it has squillions of MPs and just won a gigantic election victory. But even in this position it cannot afford to squander impetus and authority. It needs those things to get stuff done, and to cultivate its 2024 voters for the next election.
That is what is most surprising about these mistakes. Labour had a long time to prepare for the 2024 election, and did so ruthlessly. It squared away reputational problems, it carefully mapped out its messaging and deployed a grid of announcements and tactics with great discipline.
Around the country, it is already swinging into action to prepare for the next election. New MPs are working their constituencies to build an incumbency advantage and to get their activists straight back on the doorstep.
If they are undermined in those efforts by negative headlines fueled by errors at the top, they will soon grow frustrated.
Mark Wallace is Chief Executive of Total Politics Group
