The UK is in desperate need of an effective opposition

If the atmosphere at the Labour conference was a good deal less euphoric than might have been expected for a party just returning to government on the back of a landslide majority after 14 years in the wilderness, the mood among Conservatives as they assembled in Birmingham was a little more upbeat than might have been predicted, given the scale of the party’s election defeat. This slight uplift, however, largely reflected the missteps of the new government in its first weeks, rather than any achievement of the Conservatives over the same time.

Nor should the extent of the government’s difficulties be exaggerated. The reality is that, for all Labour’s recent discomfiture, there remains a huge disparity between Labour, on the one hand – with its swingeing overall parliamentary majority, a cabinet at work, a Budget in preparation, and a prime minister whose position and authority are not in dispute – and an opposition, on the other, that barely warrants the name.

That there is a void where His Majesty’s Opposition should be is partly an accident of timing. The election was held very soon before the summer recess. Rishi Sunak lost no time announcing his resignation as party leader, but the start of the new parliamentary term was fast followed by the party conference season, and the protracted process of electing his successor has another month to run.

It may be a good democratic use of the party conference to stage leadership hustings, but the fact is that the Conservatives go into their conference with four candidates vying for the leadership and no prospect of a new party agenda until a new leader is in place – and not necessarily even then, unless unity suddenly breaks out.

Mr Sunak’s notably low-key approach to opposition in the few weeks that parliament has been in session since the election, and his decision to take a back seat at the conference, can be understood, if only from the perspective of not wanting to complicate life for the next leader. But it has hardly helped. For democracy to work, any elected government needs an effective opposition, and a government with such a commanding majority as this one needs it more than most.

For while the government’s difficulties should not be exaggerated – either in terms of any threat to the prime minister and his cabinet or in comparison to the conduct of certain previous prime ministers – its lapses should not be ignored either. Indeed, it is the responsibility of the opposition to identify them and call the government to account.

Thus far, that job has been left to dissenting MPs on the government’s own benches, to the media, and to lobby groups and indignant members of the public on phone-ins and social media. The Conservative challenge has amounted to little more than a cacophony of divergent voices, whether on the means-testing of winter fuel payments (which some support, and some don’t) or the drip-drip of revelations about “freebies” accepted by the prime minister, his wife, and senior ministers (a subject on which some Conservative frontbenchers could have their own reasons for soft-pedalling).

The latest demarche – in the form of Labour MP Rosie Duffield’s resignation letter to the prime minister – contained justifiable criticisms, both of flaws in Starmer’s leadership and of the clear contradiction between his acceptance of suits, glasses and luxury accommodation worth thousands of pounds, and the abolition of fuel payments to most pensioners and the retention of the two-child benefit cap.

If Duffield’s charges were justified, however, their authority could not but be diminished by her record as something of a professional maverick and her outspoken stance on gender and other issues. While her Labour credentials should not be in question – and she spelt them out in her letter – her tendency to put her personal views above party solidarity, even when that might be undesirable, make her resignation, and the professed reasons for it, less damaging to the government than they might otherwise have been.

Her position from now on would surely be stronger if she risked a by-election to validate her new status as an independent MP. But it is also worth imagining how much more effective those same criticisms would have been had they come from a united, motivated and forceful opposition.

Given the real change that voters hoped for on 4 July and the state of the wider world as it is, the country needs not just a strong government with the integrity and service ethic that the prime minister initially promised, but a Conservative front bench capable of holding them to account. Four months of weak to non-existent opposition is far too long.