The one thing Keir Starmer must do to avoid the traps laid by the Tories

The Conservative conference in Manchester may have looked like a shambles to you and me, but perhaps it was a cunning plan.

The most outrageous suggestion this week was that Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser, had been recalled to No 10 – and that it was his idea to cancel HS2 in order to create a backlash from former prime ministers.

The rumour is that Cummings’s advice to Rishi Sunak was: “Do the mental stuff that proves you’re not the Establishment.” That would be a cunning plan, or even a Cummings plan, worthy of Baldrick of Blackadder.

On that reading of the Tory conference, the presentational disaster of the prime minister refusing for three weeks to confirm that HS2 to Manchester would go ahead, while denying that a decision had been made, was all deliberate. It was designed to draw attention to Sunak making a big, controversial decision that would appeal to swing voters – not just because small transport projects are more credible than big ones, but because it hammers home the message that the prime minister is careful with taxpayers’ money.

Well, it is a theory, isn’t it?

There may even be a couple of germs of truth in it, in that Cummings was always opposed to HS2, and in that cutting HS2 could potentially present a problem for an incoming Labour government.

The clever talk in Manchester was of Sunak laying “traps” for Starmer. But they are not very well-disguised traps, and the prospect of Starmer falling into them is nil.

If the Labour leader has shown one thing in his three-and-a-half years in charge, it is that he tends to move from being on the wrong side of public opinion to being on the right side, rather than the other way round.

So when journalists asked Starmer if he would restore HS2 in full if Labour were in government, he said: “Can I stand here and commit to reversing the decision on HS2? No, I can’t. Not least because the government is already releasing land between Birmingham and Manchester.”

That is a different way of saying: “Yes, I see that elephant trap in front of me, with a neon light above it saying: ‘Elephant trap: please fall in.’ And I am going to go around it.”

So, Labour is not going to promise to build the second stage of HS2 in full, or at all. Just as it is not going to reverse Sunak’s plan to ban the sale of cigarettes by raising the age limit year by year. That is, after all, a Labour policy, albeit a policy of the Labour government of New Zealand.

The only trap that Labour has fallen into – and it was only a small one, which it will climb out of again – was in response to the prime minister’s announcement about net zero last month. Ed Miliband, the shadow energy secretary, responded to the postponement of the ban on sales of new petrol-only cars from 2030 to 2035 by pledging to reverse the decision, and put the ban back to 2030.

As I say, it was only a small trap, and falling into it allowed Labour to avoid falling into the larger trap of promising to reverse all the prime minister’s changes.

Thus, Miliband quietly accepted that a Labour government would copy the Tories in allowing people to keep their gas boilers. And I think Labour is all but certain to decide, by the time of the election, that it will keep the 2035 date for petrol cars after all – on the grounds that a further change would only add to uncertainty.

This will be the approach underpinning the Labour conference next week. Starmer, Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, and even Miliband will avoid promising to reverse anything the Conservatives have done. They will avoid making big, costable promises. They will ignore all the commentators demanding that they “go big”, or that they unveil some bold, radical or visionary promises. Never mind that, Starmer will say: here is some soaring rhetoric instead.

He can’t do soaring rhetoric, of course, so his speech is going to be dreadful. But he is not going to fall into the Tory traps; he is going to stay miles ahead in the opinion polls; and everyone in Liverpool next week will be happy.