Blair filled me with hope in 1997 but Keir is just stirring up apathy (2024)

Do you remember 1997? I certainly do. They were heady days for a young Labour member (I was 32 and I’m counting that as young). Since I’d been eligible to vote, there had only ever been Conservative governments.

But all that changed with New Labour. After four successive election defeats, Tony Blair brought hope and expectation.

As D:Ream put it in the song that will forever be associated with Labour’s campaign, Things Can Only Get Better. Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.

But it wasn’t just me and my fellow Labour members who were full of hope. There was a deep-seated sense that the country was on the verge of a transformation – that the tired Tories were on the way out and a bright, young, forward-looking leader was about to take over.

As I write, with Labour poised to make impressive gains in the local elections, the parallels could hardly be more striking. Then, as now, the party approached the General Election with a record of four straight election losses – 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992 back then and, this time round, 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019.

Blair faced a Tory party exhausted after four terms in office and intellectually lost after getting rid of Baroness Thatcher in 1990. In the same way, Keir Starmer is looking to oust an administration that looks short of ideas and energy and unsure what it stands for.

In 1997, the economy was recovering after the crisis of Black Wednesday, with interest rates gradually falling from a peak of 15 per cent. Today, the economy is slowly recovering after the pandemic and inflation – which hit a peak of 11.1 per cent in October 2022 – is still running at 3.8 per cent.

Above all, these days – just like in 1997 – the air of discontent is palpable and the desire for change urgent.

But for all the similarities, it’s the contrast between Labour’s push for power 27 years ago and the equivalent effort today that is even more striking. And that contrast can be summed up in two names: Tony Blair and Keir Starmer.

Blair was personable, charismatic and charming, with the oratorical gifts of a latter-day Cicero – Starmer, to put it mildly, is not.

Asked what they think of the serving Labour leader, voters tell pollsters he is ‘boring’, ‘weak’ and ‘indecisive’. And that’s if they have given the matter any thought at all. Presented with a list of words to describe him, more people responded with ‘Don’t know enough to say’ than those who plumped for any adjective in particular.

But here’s the rub: despite all that, the polls show Starmer heading to Downing Street. The country is so fed up with the Conservatives that, despite a near total lack of enthusiasm for its prime ministerial candidate, Labour has a consistent poll lead of around 20 per cent.

The last time the party had such a commanding and consistent poll lead was in the run-up to the 1997 landslide, with its majority of 179 for New Labour, buoyed by what Sarah Palin, the former US Republican vice-presidential candidate, caustically called ‘the hopey, changey thing’ – a reference to Barack Obama.

This time round, the driving force behind Labour’s poll lead isn’t breathless anticipation of a Labour government. Hardly.

Hands up if you know what Starmer’s ‘Five Missions’ are. It’s almost as if he has locked them all away in a safe, only to be opened if he wins power, rather than build up any sense of expectation over what he might do. They’re all there on Labour’s website, it’s true, but how many voters have bookmarked labour.org.uk?

And a cursory examination of the Five Missions reveals them to be little more than vague notions cloaked in feelgood slogans: ‘Get Britain building again’, ‘Switch on Great British Energy’, ‘Get the NHS back on its feet’, ‘Take back our streets’ and ‘Break down barriers to opportunity’.

What cold, hard promises do they offer? Labour’s problem isn’t that it hasn’t made any promises to do anything in power. It’s that it’s impossible to get any sense of what the point of a Labour government would be, other than not being a Tory one.

That’s clearly enough for some voters. But what happens when difficult decisions have to be taken in office and when the sheen wears off after a few months?

What a contrast with Blair in 1997 and his ‘pledge card’ for government, which had five specific promises: Cut class sizes to 30 or under for five, six and seven-year-olds; fast-track punishment for persistent young offenders; cut NHS waiting lists by treating an extra 100,000 patients; get 250,000 under-25-year-olds off benefit and into work; and no rise in income tax rates.

We knew what we were voting for because those five pledges were clear-cut and easy to judge. Labour would either have delivered on them, or it wouldn’t. (It did.)

Keir Starmer’s Labour, on the other hand, has had only one even vaguely well-known policy, which after three years it has now dumped – spending £28 billion on its so-called ‘Green New Deal’. By one calculation, Labour repeated the £28 billion pledge 311 times. But in February, Starmer ditched it, slashing it to just £4.7 billion. So much for clarity. So much for a political identity.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Blair’s 1997 victory is what happened in the aftermath. The mood of the country changed almost overnight. Such was his popularity that for a few months after winning he was getting net approval ratings of 80 per cent. Millions more people claimed they had voted for him than actually did.

Rock stars and film icons, normally averse to mingling with politicians, flocked to his standard. The now infamous ‘Cool Britannia’ party – held at No 10 three months after polling day – quickly became one of the most iconic events of the New Labour era. Celebrities from Helen Mirren and Eddie Izzard to Noel Gallagher and Lenny Henry were invited to Britain’s seat of power to sip champagne with Tony Blair, the youngest Prime Minister since 1812.

Keir Starmer is plainly a decent man who has what he believes to be the country’s best interests at heart. And though popularity with luvvies and pop stars is no barometer of talent or leadership, a capacity to inspire is important. Starmer plainly lacks it.

In the 1974 election, Willie Whitelaw (who went on to be Mrs Thatcher’s deputy) is said to have accused Harold Wilson of ‘going round the country stirring up apathy’. Fast-forward 50 years, and here we go again.

When Blair took power on May 2, 1997, the sun shone brightly. As Starmer basks in his predicted success today, the weather promised to be unseasonably cold and wet. Could there ever be a more appropriate metaphor?

Stephen Pollard is editor-at-large of the Jewish Chronicle