Ten weeks after the election, the Labour party is still sorting through the heap of reasons why it lost. Most can be filed under one simple rubric: the Conservatives were better at politics. Team Cameron had a stronger message, better communicated by a more attractive candidate. That doesn’t mean the Tory campaign was good in either a moral or a technical sense. It was just good enough to beat Labour. Many circumstances favoured Ed Miliband: an unloved government with a record of broken promises, the Liberal Democrats collapsing, helpful constituency boundaries.
“All those things we were saying about how it was a hard election for us to lose were true,” a rueful Miliband adviser tells me. “We just still managed to lose it.” Perhaps because victory felt close so recently, Labour is struggling to grasp the depth of its political inferiority. It takes false comfort by denigrating superiority in the purely practical side of things — the shabby business of winning. This is a significant cultural difference between the two major tribes in British politics. Conservatives see governing as a vocation, intrinsically the right thing to do. Failure in elections is a betrayal of the party’s purpose. For Tories there is an obvious correlation between what is good and what works. Labour tends to measure virtue and effectiveness on separate scales, making it possible, especially on the left fringe, to see failure as righteous and victory as betrayal. Marginalising that tendency was Tony Blair’s achievement; rehabilitating it is Miliband’s legacy.
More people voted Tory than Labour. They won’t change their minds if the opposition radiates contempt for their opinions. The party’s leadership contest has become a contortionist act to avoid confronting two truths about the electorate. First, more people voted Tory than voted Labour. Second, they may have had decent motives, based on the evidence before them. They are not bad people, and they won’t change their minds if the opposition radiates contempt for their opinions.
Liz Kendall is the only candidate to express that perspective — and her reward is pillory on social media as a traitor and a crypto-Conservative. Aside from being untrue (Kendall’s leftish policies include worker representation on boards and reversal of anti-union laws), the Tory-in-disguise charge gives the impression of a party itching to purge potential emissaries to challenging electoral domains. Yet many people who agree with Kendall struggle to be enthusiastic about her campaign. She has misjudged the balance between delivering hard truths to the party and charmlessly rubbing it up the wrong way, which in turn raises doubts about the tuning of her political antennae. Some MPs tell me they resent the assumption that anyone of a New Labour disposition must rally to the most “Blairite” candidate, when they doubt she has the gravitas or agility to lead.
Strategic plan
Britain just re-elected an Old Etonian prime minister, which implies that an elite background is not such a deal-breaker. Some would-be Kendallites are choosing Yvette Cooper instead as the candidate who, purely in performance terms, looks readier for the top job. The strategic plan for Cooper’s campaign was to rise above the party’s parochial left-right schism, talking about the global economic challenges facing Britain in the 21st century: Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology” renewed for the digital age. That theme hasn’t resonated in the hustings, and Kendall’s camp accuses Cooper of resorting to desperate measures, stirring up tribalism by depicting compromise with the electorate as “swallowing the Tory manifesto”.
If Andy Burnham was ever tempted to nibble at Conservative sensibilities, he lost his appetite when Jeremy Corbyn entered the race. The former health secretary’s status as the frontrunner has been bolstered by expectation that he will benefit most from second-preference votes on ballots that are cast for the backbench rebel from Islington North. The scale of Corbyn’s support is hard to judge since no one knows the complexion of tens of thousands of new supporters signed up since the election.
The theory among MPs is that the whole party has tilted sharply leftwards. Some of Corbyn’s backing represents an ideological takeover bid. Most of it reflects a less doctrinaire, more emotional frustration with the unimaginative, defensive and haggard mannerisms of the other candidates, who come across as the congealed residue of New Labour. An idealistic younger generation and old believers crave the passion and fixed purpose of a social justice crusade. That need is met by the avuncular Bennite, speaking without contamination by any ministerial office held in the past or any expectation of having to make hard governing choices in the future.
Corbynism is a festival on the beach of opposition, which appeals to many Labour supporters more than the choppy waters that must be sailed on the way back to power.
Labour leader Burnham has calibrated his position accordingly, praising Corbyn’s role and leaving open the option of including him in the shadow cabinet. Labour MPs presume this is a tactical feint. Backers of rival candidates view it with disdain. They fear Burnham’s leadership would be compromised by the same debt to an intransigent left that Miliband incurred to win the crown, and which caused him endless strife.
“Has he never played chess?” asks one despairing shadow cabinet minister. “Can he not see more than one move ahead?”
Burnham’s supporters say he is winning because of the “emotional connection” he has with audiences. He does a good line in empathic folksy rejection of the posh-boy Westminster “bubble”.
He explains how his journey as a comprehensive-schooled north-west outsider turned special adviser andcareer politician affords valuable insight into the iniquities of a system populated by southern public school-educated insiders turned special advisers and career politicians. But Britain just re-elected an Old Etonian prime minister, which implies that an elite background is not such a dealbreaker. It certainly doesn’t cancel out a reputation for managing the economy properly in many eyes. Reluctance to talk about what it would take to befriend that constituency is a symptom of deeper delusion in the Labour party.
It is the belief that there is some way of doing politics that navigates around Conservative voters instead of sailing towards them; that there is a way to stay virtuous in terms policed by the self-appointed cardinals of socialism, and also be effective at politics as judged by anyone else. Miliband showed it can’t be done. Just to double check, Burnham could always try floating becalmed through a parliament, boards shrinking beneath him, an albatross made of Corbyn’s ballot papers around his neck.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Rafael Behr has been the political editor of the New Statesman, chief leader writer on the Observer and a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times in Russia and eastern Europe.
