‘Disillusioned’ voters still not in love with Labour, warns Kinnock
VOTERS are not in love with the Labour Party, Lord Kinnock has said, sparking claims that the next general election could be a repeat of 1992.
The former Labour leader said it is ‘fair’ to say the public is not convinced by his party, and suggested it was not guaranteed to win a majority.
Lord Kinnock told the BBC Radio 4’s The Week In Westminster yesterday: ‘People will say, “Let’s get the bloody Tories out”, but they won’t say, “Hurrah, hurrah, marvellous, freedom, liberation is with us because of Keir Starmer”. They are entirely different departments of human sentiment.’
Asked if the country was ‘deeply disillusioned with the
Tories’ but ‘not yet fully convinced or in love with the Labour pitch’, Lord Kinnock said: ‘I think that’s fair. And I think that it’s pretty natural after 14 years of continuous Conservative-led and Conservative governments. Expressing enthusiasm is different from expressing desperation.’
Conservative Party chairman Richard Holden told The Mail on Sunday: ‘Lord Kinnock is just saying what the public know about Sir Keir Starmer.
‘There is no love for Starmer because no one can trust a word he says. Starmer pretends to be something and then tacks and turns and takes the British people for fools.’
A Tory insider added: ‘No one election is the same as another but it’s clear nothing is in the bag for Labour.’ Lord Kinnock was Labour leader in the run-up to the 1992 general election, when his party was ahead in the polls and expected to win, only to be beaten by Sir John Major.
He famously appeared at a Labour rally in Sheffield days before the election, shouting: ‘We’re all right!’
Yesterday he declined to say whether the run-up to the next general election resembled 1992 or 1997, when Tony Blair won by a landslide, saying no two elections were the same.
He added: ‘I don’t think we’ll lose. In fact, I think I can say with some certainty we’re not going to lose.
‘When it comes to trying to guess the possibility of majorities – large, medium, small – I simply won’t engage in that.’
Last week, Labour was 30 points ahead of the Tories in a YouGov poll, the biggest lead since Liz Truss’s premiership. It came after Rishi Sunak’s party lost 470 council seats and its West Midlands mayor.
But the Tories seized on analysis which used the local elections to predict national vote share in a general election, to warn the country could be on course for a hung Parliament.
Sir Keir’s team is keen to warn against complacency. Yesterday, Labour chairman Anneliese Dodds told The Telegraph: ‘We can be very good at losing elections people thought we would win. Think of 1992.’
Last week, Sir Keir came under fire from his MPs after accepting Tory MP Natalie Elphicke into the party.
A Tory source said: ‘It’s not a good sign if Keir is already sidelining his own MPs and not listening to his MPs.’
‘It’s clear nothing is in the bag for Keir’
LORD Kinnock is probably our greatest living expert in losing elections when you expected to win them. He did this very spectacularly in 1992, to his own fury and that of the Labour Party.
One theory is that a vainglorious, triumphal rally, in Sheffield on April Fools’ Day, eight days before polling, torpedoed what would otherwise have been a victory.
So Sir Keir Starmer should heed his wise and experienced forerunner. He should not be angry with him for going on the radio and being unenthusiastic about Labour’s chances. Nor should Sir Keir chide his party chairwoman, Anneliese Dodds MP, for remarking that ‘We [Labour] can be very good at losing elections people thought we would win.’ She also referenced the 1992 debacle.
Those with long memories can remember others, especially 1970, when the Labour Party (and the polls) thought they would win until the results started to come in, and 1964, when Harold Wilson’s thrusting, white-hot Labour Party were very nearly defeated by the skull-faced, tweed-clad aristocrat Sir Alec DouglasHome, written off by experts as a hopeless campaigner and an anachronism.
Well, as so often, so much for experts. Lord Kinnock’s lack of enthusiasm for Sir Keir’s ‘Changed Labour’ was beautifully expressed in his BBC interview, when he said: ‘People will say, “Let’s get the bloody Tories out”, but they won’t say, “Hurrah, marvellous, freedom, liberation is with us because of Keir Starmer.’”
These feelings are, as he drily put it, ‘entirely different departments of human sentiment’. It is in any case possible that Lord Kinnock preferred the Labour Party before Sir Keir changed it. Certainly a lot of Sir Keir’s colleagues and supporters have been severely jolted by the supposed defection of Natalie Elphicke.
Ms Elphicke is a woman of many and rapidly varying opinions, on private and public matters, but nobody had ever previously accused her of being a Labour supporter. She does not even look like one in the weird publicity shots of her with the Opposition Leader, pretending to be friends. Such defections are normally quite minor events, forgotten in a day. But this one threatens to loom over politics for weeks ahead, because it is so fascinatingly unconvincing, and because it has genuinely infuriated many Labour supporters.
Perhaps the best and most piercing mockery of it came from the Tory frontbencher Penny Mordaunt. She laughingly dismissed suggestions that she too might defect – because she is too Left-wing to fit in a party which welcomes Ms Elphicke.
Labour activists have been jeering in turn that perhaps Sir Keir is now trying to woo Tory Rightwing hardliner Nadine Dorries. This event is a serious wobble and it is doing serious damage. And its roots lie in the same overconfidence that led to the catastrophic 1992 Sheffield rally.
Right up to polling day, voters enjoy a sort of holiday from seriousness. They can tell each other, and pollsters, that they won’t vote Tory or they will vote Labour, because they are angry with the Conservatives for their failures and mistakes. But that does not mean they are truly committed.
Labour’s other major initiative of last week – a bombastic, empty new immigration policy with all the firepower of a water pistol – must have reminded many of just how useless they are on this and so many other major issues that matter.
Meanwhile, the deterrent effect of the Rwanda scheme has been demonstrated clearly in Ireland. And the economy is looking better every day.
Can we all please stop assuming that the election is a foregone conclusion?