Keir Starmer has just hired his fourth political comms chief in as many years. Oh, dear. The reshuffle may shuffle the pack, but it does not resolve the central question: what, and who, is this government for? As one commentator in the FT put it this week, Starmer’s operation increasingly resembles Manchester United: a squad stacked with big reputations and impressive CVs, yet no guarantee that swapping personnel will make the team click. Sometimes it isn’t the players who need changing. It’s the gaffer.
The contrast with Tony Blair is telling. However contested his policies, New Labour had a mission that gave coherence to everyone. It’s mission was known by the Cabinet, backbench MPs, civil servants and civil society. New Labour was “working hard to change Britain, so that in the modern world, it is the many not the privileged few that succeed”. That statement did three things at once. It identified whose side Labour was on. It promised transformation. And it anchored the project in modernisation and the future. You could disagree with it, but you could not mistake it.
Peter Hyman’s wonderful recent essay revisits this lesson. It’s well worth a full read here. He reminds us that political messaging works at three levels.
The mission. The why. The higher purpose that explains the project and gives voters a reason to stick with it when mistakes inevitably happen. Blair’s mission wasn’t word-perfect, but it was enough to hold the centre.
The conceptual frame. The middle tier. This is where most governments stumble. It is the intellectual grammar that underpins each policy area. Blair’s famous “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” was not just a slogan. It was a framework that structured both policing and social policy. If you committed a crime, you were going to pay. But his Government was also going to do its best to eliminate the social deprivation that leads to crime.
The retail offer. The what. The visible pledges and benefits people can feel in their lives. But retail only works if it grows organically from the other two tiers. Announcing “more bobbies on the beat” only resonates once people believe you are serious about tackling both crime and its causes.
By contrast, Theresa May’s “Strong and Stable” was little more than an assertion. Which government chooses to be weak and unstable? It was a slogan without a philosophy. It was transactional, not transformative. The fact that she delivered it in a robotic manner didn’t help either.
Too often, parties leap straight to the third tier, mistaking policy retail for political story. The public see through it. They know when a promise is detached from a philosophy. They sense when government is reacting, not leading.
Labour’s task in year two of government is to reconstruct its message from the top down. Who is it for? What is the conceptual spine that runs through growth, NHS reform, welfare, climate? Only then should it move to the retail offer that voters can hold in their hands.
Politics is craft. Strategy and message are not decoration but direction. Blair’s weekend faxes from Chequers may look quaint in the age of WhatsApp, but they embodied something more important: the relentless, sometimes painful work of clarifying the mission. Until Starmer and his team do the same, no number of new comms chiefs will fix the problem.