2 days ago
Keir Starmer's fate lies with strivers and grafters
There are a few people here you really ought to meet. I know we said this about Stevenage Woman, Workington Man and the others — the guy from Basildon with the Ford Mondeo and that nice working mum from Worcester — but give them a chance. Once you've heard about them you might understand a little more of the government's thinking. You might even recognise yourself.
The cabinet, special advisers and civil servants met them recently. If they are working the way Downing Street wants, they'll be thinking of these people constantly: two big groups amounting to about 20 per cent of the electorate. Say hello to the Grafting Realists and Striving Moderates: the two most important segments of the government's new polling model. Sir Keir Starmer won't think he is succeeding until they trust the state again.
Both groups have had a hard time of late. Their living standards have been stagnant for so long that they've almost lost hope. The Grafting Realists, a little older and likely resident in what was once called the red wall, were impoverished by inflation. They are working class, mostly white, and have the traditional attitudes those words imply. For the Striving Moderates of Middle England's lower middle class, it was spiking interest rates that proved most painful. Theirs are the houses with mortgages a little too big for comfort and a financed car on the drive that's now a burden. (Starmer surely sees something of himself in both.)
No wonder they can't quite trust the government. For five years, whoever happens to lead it has let them down. Covid, partygate, Liz Truss, runaway inflation, soaring immigration figures, a broken NHS: prime ministers either seemed indifferent, incapable, or downright dangerous. The government's data doesn't write them off as a lost cause – you might chalk up their trust in the state at anything between four and six out of ten — but those Grafting Realists and Striving Moderates are deeply dissatisfied people.
I say 'the government' rather than 'Labour' because this is not a party political enterprise. This is polling of trust in government, not electoral preference. It's informing the choices the Cabinet Office's New Media Unit make as they communicate policy announcements — be that the immigration white paper or the spending review — to different demographics on social media. Of course, renewed trust in the government's ability to get things right is likely to pay dividends for its incumbent management. It's also true that the Grafting Realists and Striving Moderates are the people who make the difference in elections.
That, however, is secondary to the point many people in Westminster are still missing. The Conservative Party in particular struggles on under the misapprehension that voters are preoccupied with gradations of left and right. We might say the same of grumblers who'd like the Labour Party to be loud and proud with its progressivism. Really what is at stake is far more profound than whether Robert Jenrick ends up sounding as tough on migration as Rupert Lowe or the tone Starmer takes when he talks about welfare reform. If the public cannot be convinced to trust mainstream governments to deliver, then the show is likely to be over for conventional politics. What one No 10 aide perhaps unfairly calls 'the politics of anger' will take its place.
Starmer knows this. He knows, too, that Nigel Farage knows it — hence the prime minister's decision to treat him as the true leader of the opposition and elevate him to heights no leader of five MPs has ever known. Earlier this week I watched Angela Rayner fill in for Starmer at Prime Minister's Questions with Chris Ward, his parliamentary private secretary and longest serving aide, in the Times Radio studio.
Ward, liberated in Starmer's absence from his weekly obligation to prep the PM, said something revealing. Parliamentary arithmetic has frozen in aspic a political reality that no longer exists. It makes little sense for Starmer to treat each Wednesday lunchtime as an exercise in beating Kemi Badenoch, or answering her questions at any length. Instead he hopes to 'speak over the chamber's heads, and directly to country'. The Grafting Realists and Striving Moderates will be in his mind's eye.
Will they be listening? In No 10, aides are cautiously optimistic. But Farage is speaking to the same people too: simply, directly, and more and more substantially. On Monday, I'm told, he will vow to 'restore the social contract between the rich and poor' in his most expansive speech on economic and social policy yet. (One luxury of opposition is not having to supervise the slide into World War III.) 'It's very Robin Hood,' says one adviser. The logic of that language suggests Reform's internal discussions on a wealth tax could be concluding in a surprising way. How would Labour oppose that? In the meantime, there will be concrete and costed proposals — detailed in a ten-page policy paper whose very existence reflects Farage's new awareness that his sums must add up — to 'put money straight into the pockets of the poorest workers in the society'.
Note that language: workers. Farage told me in the weeks before the local elections that he believes his natural constituency is 'the respectable working class', synonyms for which obviously include 'grafters' and 'strivers'. He will lionise them as 'the people who set their alarm clocks in the morning'. On a recent trip to Budapest, Reform officials sought advice from aides to Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, on welfare policy, and are enthused by one of their suggestions: lifting the two-child benefit cap only for working mothers.
For Labour, pigeonholing this stuff is difficult. Many of its MPs struggle to resist the impulse to write it off as fantasy politics from the radical right. What is emerging from Reform is more omnivorous, syncretic and, for all Farage's stridency, full of confounding nuance.
When Richard Tice, Reform's deputy leader, told me of his plans to dial back Bank of England independence last week, I saw shades of Peter Shore, the Labour maverick who said the same in the 1990s. A streak of statism coexists with the anti-bureaucratic nationalism of Pierre Poujade, the populist whose movement of overtaxed shopkeepers shook French politics before General de Gaulle returned to save the republic in 1958. Farage's strategists would prefer all this to be sold by outsiders — like Luke Campbell, the Olympic boxer turned Reform mayor of Hull – as their heroes in Italy's Five Star Movement did.
It's easy for a government to say none of this would work, or dismiss it as 'nostalgic', as one cabinet minister did when we spoke about last week. But if Starmer's Grafting Realists and Striving Moderates can't believe him, he'll go the way of the other prime ministers who squandered their trust. As his gaze turns to the Middle East, he shouldn't forget the audience that matters most. Farage won't.
