The woes of this Government are overdone.
Too much froth is spewed from the mouths of journalists and commentators still addicted to the permanent sugarcane of the Tory years. Excited talk of Sir Keir Starmer being finished and out in 2025 continues to ignore the cardinal fact of this political era: Labour’s parliamentary majority is unassailable and Labour rarely changes its leaders.
There have been some solid achievements. The riots, which were a moment of genuine and potentially irrecoverable political peril, were handled well by both the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary. Angela Rayner’s workers plan is the biggest expansion of labour rights for 15 years. Proposed planning reforms are genuinely radical, if executed in full. Strikes have been averted, albeit at a cost. Sterling has been strengthened, despite the teetering economy – but it will benefit in the long term from parliamentary political stability in a world which looks volatile with few reliable investment destinations in developed markets.
For all the excitement, few have noticed that Labour’s polling lead has just dipped a bit since the election, with the Conservatives showing no sign of revival at all.
That is not to say, however, that the Government is without problems. It too often displays a lack of strategic sense, forever prioritising short-term tactical gain. And despite news management improving since the No 10 reorganisation this autumn, ministers continue to lack a clear, simple communication strategy to articulate what this administration is about.
This is curious because at the heart of government, there is a clarity about what the Government’s objective is: they are clear eyed that they are the last line of defence of mainstream British politics and the rise of the radical right.
Morgan McSweeney in particular, the Prime Minister’s chief adviser, having cut his teeth fighting the BNP, has no doubt as to the scale of the challenge. Their prescription is that government simply has to work better, to tangibly improve people’s lives, in modest but important ways: potholes to be filled, class sizes to be reduced, waiting lists to come down.
When this happens, the theory goes, voters will turn away from extremes. Starmer and McSweeney say this as if it is an incontestable fact – I am not so convinced. And this is where forces beyond Starmer’s control start to enter the mix.
Because a dominant theme of 2025 for Britain and the world will be the Donald Trump restoration and his coterie including the unexpected Rasputin-like figure of Elon Musk. And it is around Musk where the Government weakness to value tactics over strategy is most gaping.
I have been shocked by the lack of urgency among ministers (though not a substantial cohort of Labour MPs) about the prospect of Musk donating enormous sums of money to Nigel Farage’s Reform. Though we might think some of this is Farage’s typical mischief-making, there can be no doubt about the positive tweets sent by the billionaire about Reform, nor the bonhomie on display between them in a now iconic picture of the two of them, taken at Mar-a-Lago last week. A $100m (£80m) donation would be a game changer in British politics, eclipsing anything we’ve ever seen.
I was astonished again while interviewing Lucy Powell, the Leader of the Commons, on my LBC Sunday show just before Christmas, by what she had to say on the matter. She acknowledged that any such donation, to any party, would be bad for politics and would amount to foreign interference in our elections, already illegal in current law, though a loophole that could see Musk donate via a UK subsidiary.
Yet she made clear that the Government intended to take precisely no action to prevent it any time soon, by even closing this loophole. She said that Labour had a packed legislative programme for the next session, and argued that you can’t “change the rules of the game” in the middle of playing.
On the same day, The Observer reported that ministers had decided they didn’t want to face the accusation from Farage that the “establishment” was trying to rig things against him. All of these arguments are classic examples of Labour bedwetting.
Do we think for a moment, that if an equivalent foreign backer, say Bill Gates, was proposing a game-changing donation to Labour, that the Conservatives or Reform would not change the rules at pace? This is how populists win. They don’t observe norms and rules, while established players do, indeed they fret about them. Moreover, Farage will always claim that the establishment is trying to rig things against him – he’s made a career out of it.
It’s about recognising that right now British politics is primed for manipulation, because the regimes we have around donations and online advertising are antiquated and not fit for purpose.
The Electoral Commission is often weak and gutless, whilst regulation for political advertising online is virtually non-existent, despite TV and radio being heavily controlled.
With Musk’s money, Farage could flood the digital space with savvy communications, spread misinformation, and dominate the political conversation.
My mum's two big loves died, but her desire to try again is incredible
Read MoreAnd this is where we go back to Starmer/McSweeney diagnosis: even if they’re right, even if politics hasn’t changed, and people just want those modest, everyday improvements, even assuming ministers can deliver them at pace and scale, in an era where content is king, narrative is all: it is entirely possible voters might experience it and still not believe it’s happened.
Sometimes, where I feel this Government is out of its depth, is that it still believes that what voters experience is more important than what they see on their phones.
It is indisputably in Labour’s interest to act – but more importantly it’s in the country’s.
So Starmer – use the moment not only to make sure that a faraway oligarch does not become a fixture of a country of which he knows nothing, but to permanently reform party funding, which invites corruption and scandal.
Use it to tackle how politics is consumed in the digital space, which right now is a Wild West. If this Government does nothing else in its long term ahead, it will have done us all a favour.
Lewis Goodall is a journalist, broadcaster and host of the podcast The News Agents
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