This feels like the ghost campaign or the campaign that didn’t happen. The Prime Minister evidently wishes he were somewhere else. The Labour party are so far ahead that it discourages them from risk. The leading spokespeople are tutored into cliché. Television stunts are managed into dullness. The newspapers no longer matter even though the right-wing press will soil itself with indignation trying to recuperate a moribund Rishi. Above all, neither party really has a lot to tell us. The issues they do not want to discuss are more important than those they do. The parade will pass by but it is only worth a passing glance. The whole thing feels redundant, done, over.
The prospect of the first Labour government since 2010 is intriguing. How will they cope? Will Starmer look the part? What do they really want, if indeed they know? But first we have to wade through these muddy waters for six weeks. Such interest as anyone can summon for all this choreographed emptiness will be about how Labour is defined. The character of a campaign can have some effect on the nature of a government so watching how the Labour party styles itself will be notable. So will how the Tories try to characterize Labour. The unflattering definition cast upon a party by a disobliging rival is usually a good guide to that party’s weakness. Labour has plenty of Tory weaknesses to expose – really, that is shooting fish in a barrel. But how will the Tories describe Labour?
The master argument will be that Starmer doesn’t know who he is. That his tendency to change his mind reveals a man not only prepared to say whatever will please his current audience but a man who, in truth, does not really even know his own mind. As John Major once said of Neil Kinnock: “the reason he talks so much is that he doesn’t know what’s he trying to say, so he has no idea when he’s finished”. There is a germ of truth in the characterization. Starmer is a late starter in politics and he is less ideologically formed than many politicians of his age. That’s also an advantage of course because it makes him flexible, rather in the manner of vintage conservatives.
The problem with this critique is not that it will not stick but that the Conservatives will not stick to it. Rishi Sunak’s campaign launch speech was all about the terrible danger that Mr Starmer poses to the future of the nation. I suppose it is just about conceivable to say that a man who changes his mind is dangerous, but not really. A man who makes all the wrong decisions might be dangerous, a man who comes armed with ideological certainty in the face of a volatile circumstance, well he might be dangerous. But a distinguished lawyer who reads his brief carefully and changes his mind? Hardly.
This will lead the Tory critique into contradiction. It will surely be too tempting for the Tories to suggest that Mr Starmer, despite all appearances, is a sort of regenerated Jeremy Corbyn. It is never going to work for Sunak to accuse Starmer of being Corbyn because he so obviously isn’t. Nobody is going to blame Keir Starmer for Jeremy Corbyn. They have Jeremy Corbyn for that. And nobody is going to blame this abstract entity called “the Labour party” either because most people, if they think about it at all, will think that the Labour party temporarily lost its way under Corbyn but has found a route back to acceptability under Starmer. The Labour left is not in hiding, ready to spring back and take control. It’s a hard case to make when Mr Corbyn himself is running against the Labour party, as an independent in Islington North.
There is a subtler version of this critique which is that, though Starmer is not Corbyn, he is more left-wing than he looks. There is, it is true, quite a lot of doubt about what a Keir Starmer government would actually do. And I suppose it is reasonable, if more than a little esoteric, to point out that Starmer’s political heritage is on the soft left of the Labour party. Maybe Sunak could pin on Starmer the desire to be a little profligate with taxpayers’ money in the pursuit of state-provided remedies for social problems. That would be a conventional Tory critique of Labour: there is no money but still they want to spend it.
Yet there is a further problem with this line of argument which lies deeper than the surface. The problem with Rishi Sunak describing Keir Starmer as shifting is that it sounds too much like autobiography. Mr Sunak is himself the sort of person who changes his beliefs to fit the situation he finds himself in. Everywhere he has been, Mr Sunak has been a man whose chief trait was a willingness to conform to whatever orthodoxy prevailed at the time. He is one of life’s Head Boys. By nature safe, reliable but a touch bland, at the very high end of technically impressive without ever being truly outstanding because standing out is just not in his nature. In all his stations, Mr Sunak has been the man with the most polished boilerplate in town.
The polish will not last the campaign. This is an unnecessary election, called too early, because Mr Sunak is tired of office. The Conservative party is tired of office. It does not now have long to wait. The campaign will be an exercise in pure duration but it will at least lead to the demise of a wholly undistinguished chapter in the governance of the British state.