The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Faltering support in Red Wall threatens to spoil party for Labour
POLITICAL EDITOR
WHEN the Labour shadow cabinet meets every week, it is not uncommon for it to be shown a particular deck of slides, one that spells out election shocks of the recent past.
It is the favoured visual aid of two of the most influential figures in the court of Sir Keir Starmer – Morgan McSweeney and Pat McFadden, respectively the adviser and MP leading the party’s election campaign.
Donald Trump’s surprise win in the 2016 US presidential race, when all the polls showed he was going to lose, is in there. So too are a smattering of European campaigns when the tide turned late on.
The message is the one drilled into every member of the shadow ministerial team, indeed every Labour MP: there is no room for complacency; not a single vote has been cast.
For a political party so far ahead in the opinion polls, one set to give the
Tories their worst drubbing in a century according to a notable recent survey, Labour can be curiously skittish.
Share a coffee with any of their frontbenchers or advisers and it is clear that the ghost of 1992 – and, to a lesser extent, 2015 – still haunts those nervous to believe in the polls.
Even with this mammoth lead, there are mutterings about whether the Labour strategy is the right one and whether if they do win office it could yet come back to bite them.
Some of the chuntering surrounds cautiousness on policy. The leadership wants to make Labour the “smallest target possible” for the Tories for the campaign battle to come.
But for shadow cabinet ministers who want to deliver change in office, often seeking to get new policies with pound signs attached into the election manifesto, frustrations abound.
Rachel Reeves, the Labour shadow chancellor who preaches “iron discipline” on fiscal matters, has been nicknamed “Dr No” by some aides to fellow top Labour figures.
One adviser to a shadow cabinet minister said: “I can totally understand the frustration if you are seeking more spending and they are saying no.”
The disillusionment of the far Left of the Labour coalition with Sir Keir’s drive to win over centrist voters has been taken as a badge of pride by the leader’s team.
But now concerns are bubbling up about whether, when combined with the frustration of Muslim voters with Labour’s Israel-Gaza stance, there could be some electoral impacts.
Yesterday, The Guardian’s front page splashed on the concerns of pollsters and party insiders that Labour could lose some of its target seats if loyalists abandon ship.
Bristol Central and Sheffield Hallam, former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg’s old seat, were picked out as two Labour-held seats packed with progressives that could be lost.
Patrick English, YouGov’s director of political analytics, said: “If there is a big anti-Labour feeling among Muslim and young voters, that could cost them in a big way in places where those groups make up 10-15 per cent of the population each. If the polls are level