The Labour Party are acting like teenagers with a crush on voters

A significant portion of Britain’s political sphere has fallen into a trap best explained by thinking about teenage lust. Every other day, a Labour MP will do or say something, and the response will be: “But will the red wall even care?”

It does not matter if the MP in question is a senior shadow minister or a mere backbencher. The nature of the intervention is also irrelevant; it can be a tweet or a speech, on an issue that is big or small. Anything coming out of the opposition will be judged on its immediate effect on voters.

Similarly, the response to David Cameron’s misadventures with Greensill Capital could be summed up as: “And yet the polls haven’t moved an inch!”. It was even asked whether journalists reporting on sleaze was worth it, given the public did not seem to care much about it.

The problem is that voters rarely change their minds about a political party because of a single event. In fact, we rarely ever find out what precisely changed their minds, and even if we did, it would not be especially useful. The last straw is only ever a straw.

This is where our hypothetical, hormone-fuelled teenager comes in. If you are a woman, can you remember what the magazines said about making your crush like you back? It went something like this: hide any skin imperfections, dress in a specific way and act in a specific way, then the object of your affection may become interested in you.

Details were crucial; you were only ever a flat joke or a tasteless top away from being rejected. This entirely irrational belief can be pernicious. As an adult woman, it can be easy to panic at unexpectedly bad skin on the day of a first date, despite knowing that no one in their right mind would refrain from jumping into bed with someone because of a chin spot.

Westminster seems to be suffering from similar neuroses at the moment, for a number of reasons. For the Conservatives, it is because Boris Johnson has only ever been in campaigning or crisis mode, and no one is sure what he should be doing in quieter times to remain high up in the polls.

For the Labour Party, it is because they know the public did not like Jeremy Corbyn or Ed Miliband, but they are struggling to figure out what Keir Starmer must do to not to suffer a similar fate. Finally, we cannot avoid the fact that everyone in SW1 and elsewhere has been stuck at home for over a year, and it is easy to mistake cabin fever for worrying insularism.

Everyone in politics is going through varying degrees of a crisis of confidence, and can no longer take a simple step without worrying that it is taking them in the wrong direction.

What they need to remember, however, is that the vast majority of the public is not paying attention to their every move. In fact, most of them are probably not paying any attention to them at all. It would be hard to hold it against them – after the years of chaos and instability Britain has gone through, everyone deserves a bit of a break.

Instead, what voters tend to be good at picking up is the general mood of a party – divided, timid or pessimistic parties rarely win elections. Yet this is the image a lot of Westminster is projecting at the moment, by ceaselessly panicking about what is cutting through and what effect it is having.

Politicians are rarely advised to care less about the public and more about the bubble, but we are only 18 months into this parliament, and there is no reason to believe an election is imminent. Many MPs and journalists have never known relative peace in British politics, but they must learn to live within it.

MPs must also deal with the fact that they cannot learn lessons in real time, and that most of their mistakes will be obvious only in hindsight. Things that look small today may play a huge part in tomorrow’s fortunes or they may not. Storms may look huge from up close, then retrospectively appear to have played out in teacups.

Like anxious teenagers, uncertain politicians need to realise that confidence really is the best trick in the book. It is not guaranteed to pay off, but then nothing is – political and dating columnists would have long gone out of business otherwise.