Pity poor Keir Starmer, who has a long and difficult year of doing very little ahead of him

Time passes really slowly when you are in opposition, and really fast in government, Tony Blair said at his institute’s Christmas reception the other night. Keir Starmer knows the first part very well. He has been leader of the opposition for 32 months now, and it must feel like 32 years. He probably has another 22 months to go, if the election is in October 2024.

(Incidentally, Blair said he thought Starmer was doing a good job and was likely to win that election, although I didn’t press him on whether this meant a majority or a minority Labour government.)

Looking back over those 32 months, Starmer could be forgiven for congratulating himself on his strategic genius in sitting tight and waiting for the government to blow itself up. He always had a low opinion of Boris Johnson, and always thought it likely that he would disgrace himself in one way or another. What he could not have been sure of, though, was that Conservative Party members would choose the wrong candidate to succeed him.

And what no one expected was that, having been chosen, the wrong candidate would decide not just to follow through on the wrong programme for government that she promised during the Tory leadership election, but to go even further in the wrong direction.

So although time has passed extremely slowly for Starmer, some of it, while being bad for the country, must have given him satisfaction. No party leader can mind going from 9 points ahead in the opinion polls to 31 points ahead in the space of three weeks, however long those weeks might have seemed. Settling at an average Labour lead of 18 points after the Tories belatedly brought in Rishi Sunak, the candidate Starmer least wanted to face in the first place, feels like a comfortable end to the year.

Now what, though? All commentators agree that Starmer cannot just sit back and wait for power to drop into his lap in 2024. He’s got to set out his “vision”, preferably a “compelling” one. It must be coherent as well, and inspire people; and then he must set out some more policy detail, especially policies supported by commentators.

It is no use, for instance, and for a lot of commentators, refusing to talk about a closer relationship with the EU. He should promise to build more houses, to invest in the green revolution, to spend more on the NHS, and to pay public sector workers more. How to pay for it all is usually not specified.

Fortunately for him, Starmer did not get where he is today, just past the halfway mark on the long march to power, by doing what the commentators tell him. In many ways, he has already promised too much, and he needs to scale back his policy ambitions over the next year.

His problem was set out for him with admirable clarity by George Osborne and Ed Balls on The Andrew Neil Show in October. Osborne commented on Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow work and pensions secretary, who had just been interviewed by Neil: “If I was Labour, I would sit tight and not answer questions in the way that Jonathan just has.” And all that Ashworth had said was that Labour was not opposing the cuts to income tax or national insurance.

As Balls said, this is the politics of the baseline: the government sets out its tax and spending plans, including big cuts in public spending after the election, and challenges the opposition: “Are you going to raise taxes or do you borrow more? That’s the classic position Conservative chancellors want to get Labour into.”

Of course, Osborne and Balls are commentators too, but they have direct experience of the political economics of pre-election fiscal plans. So far, all Starmer has promised is to spend a bit more on recruiting, training and retaining NHS staff, paid for by abolishing non-dom status, with everything else paid for by putting VAT on private school fees. These are trivial sums for policies that will have an effect only in the long term, but they are symbolic of a different approach, just as Blair’s modest pledge card promises were in 1997.

Starmer and Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, have one big policy problem that they will have to resolve next year, which is what will happen to Reeves’s plan to borrow £28bn a year to invest in her Green Prosperity Plan. That seemed like a good idea at the time (2021), because the government was operating under the rule that borrowing to invest was fine (unlike borrowing for day-to-day spending). But Jeremy Hunt moved the baseline in his autumn statement last month, adding a new rule that the government shouldn’t borrow more than 3 per cent of national income a year, whatever it is for.

Now Starmer and Reeves have to decide whether to keep to that rule, in which case the Green Prosperity Plan will have to go, or to say that it is a stupid rule, and that borrowing to invest is fiscally responsible. Most economists would be on their side – there is no evidence behind the 3 per cent figure – but the politics are more difficult. Going into an election promising higher borrowing is not something I can see Starmer doing.

But how to get out of it? And how to avoid promising anything that costs any money for another 22 months? No wonder he was sidetracked into that nonsense about replacing the House of Lords. As Blair said, time passes really slowly when you are in opposition.