Forget coalitions. Keir Starmer is heading for a landslide

Voters can see the Conservative have given up on governing to fight among themselves

Keir Starmer is set to win the British election due during the next 18 months. The Labour leader will just scrape it. The unanswered question is whether, if need be, he will be ready to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. 

Received wisdom at Westminster has it half-right. Barring an extraterrestrial intervention, Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives are rushing headlong into opposition. The mistake is to underestimate the scale of the likely defeat. The pertinent question for Starmer is not whether he will need the support of a smaller party to sustain Labour in power but how to govern after a victory matching Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide.

Britain is trapped in a spiral of decline. The economy is locked into low growth and high inflation. The public realm is in an advanced state of breakdown. And the nation is looking on incredulously as the Tories prepare to fight each other over the spoils of opposition. Never has a governing party betrayed such contempt for voters it will soon ask for another term.

Sunak says he has a five-point plan to repair the damage wrought by the failed premierships of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. One small snag is that his own party is more interested in waging culture wars against transsexuals and immigrants. A bigger one is that, after 13 years in office, promises to “stop the boats” carrying cross-channel asylum seekers or to train a few more doctors and nurses for the National Health Service insult the nation’s intelligence.

Beyond falling living standards, the everyday experience of the electorate is that nothing works. Voters face a health service with record waiting times, trains that run sporadically, police that simply ignore “minor” crimes such as burglary and mugging, letters that go undelivered by Royal Mail, and rivers flooded with raw sewage. That’s before they try to renew their passports and driving licences, manage to speak to someone at the Inland Revenue or join the queues at Dover to take a European holiday.

The English nationalists in Sunak’s party say they have the answer. They want to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, leave the European Convention on Human Rights, and put an end to difficult debates about sexual equality by restoring “traditional” values. Barmy though it may seem, some of them also want to bring back Johnson. A handful still think Truss had the answer. 

Then, of course, there is Brexit. The heavy economic cost of throwing up barricades in the channel can no longer be concealed. Unsurprisingly, most voters now consider leaving the European Union to have been a mistake. The response of the Tory right is to extend the fantasy. Brexit is a great idea subsequently sabotaged by liberal elites, Whitehall and business. We all know, after all, that Soviet communism failed only because it was never truly implemented. 

Shaking a fist at social progressives, asylum seekers and pro-Europeans certainly cheers up a party activists in erstwhile Labour strongholds known as the Red Wall. For the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman and one of two others on the extreme right it also seems the post-election route to the party leadership. The message taken by the great majority of voters when polling day comes around will be that the Conservatives treated them as fools.

Somewhere here there is an ideological struggle. The party has splintered between those hanging on to Margaret Thatcher’s economic liberalism and unapologetic individualism, a dwindling band of One Nation Tories who believe in both the market and society, and far right nationalists who want a bigger state for the English and the door slammed on all things foreign.

The answer for voters is to cast their ballots for someone else. In his role as that “someone else”, Starmer’s job has been to convince the country that it will be safe in Labour’s hands. Some in his party bemoan his lack of charisma. Holdovers from the Blair era snipe that he lacks the excitement that swept New Labour to power in 1997.

They miss the point. Starmer looks like a prime minister-in-waiting and talks about the things - economic growth, living standards, the NHS, crime and the rest that most concern the electorate. The Tories have thrown away the mantle of competence. The Labour leader has picked it up. That’s more than good enough when the party in power is so determinedly bent on self-destruction.

It’s one thing, though, to be cautious in opposition. Blair later reproached himself for the timidity of his first term - something of a waste, he thought, of Labour’s huge majority. Starmer keeps telling himself that he cannot take anything for granted. Fair enough. But he should also start thinking about how to be ambitious in government.