With a sharper team in place, the Labour leader needs to exploit this government’s flaws while offering a superior alternative
In more than half a century, only two men have taken Labour from opposition to government. You have to be over 40 to have voted in the 1997 election that rewarded Tony Blair with his first landslide. You have to be 78 or older to have voted in the 1964 election which put Harold Wilson in Number 10.
It would repay Sir Keir Starmer and his recently refreshed shadow cabinet to study what these examples of rare Labour winners tell us about what it takes to be a successful opposition. One clue is in the job title. You have to oppose effectively. This does not simply amount to seizing every opportunity to expose and eviscerate the faults and follies of the prime minister and his cabinet. It also means exploiting those flaws in support of a pitiless account of why the incumbents are not fit to remain in government. Wilson relentlessly scorned the Tories of his day as a party out of touch and out of time. “Thirteen wasted years” was a label which stuck. Blair had the advantage of being opposition leader as John Major’s government slithered into a mire of sleaze and division, but that didn’t mean he just sat back and waited for power to drop into his lap. As Andrew Adonis reminds us in his excellent new book about the importance of leadership, Mr Blair was formidable at destroying the credibility of the incumbent. “Weak, weak, weak” and “I lead my party, he follows his” – the brutal phrases he used to dismantle the public reputation of his Tory opponent – “pierced Major to the political core”.
