Labour’s first 100 days haven’t gone well – but it may not matter

Don’t say they didn’t warn us.

Labour’s remarkably safe general election campaign was a masterpiece in strategic decision making. Win the right sort of voters; lose the ones you can afford to drop. Focus resources where they are most needed; neglect your areas of existing strength. Appear safe, competent, trustworthy; do not over-promise, over-excite the electorate or overestimate your own capabilities.

The result: a historic 157-seat simple majority, reversing a terrible loss in 2019 and some, giving Labour the first opportunity in more than a decade to implement a policy platform that, it believes, will benefit the country.

Also the result: an expectant public, fed-up of a decline in living standards, economic mismanagement and a feeling of untrustworthiness from the previous government, awaiting something, anything, to improve their lives.

That expectancy is at odds with what Labour thinks it can, or wants to, deliver short-term. Labour’s ‘safe’ campaign was in part due to them not needing to take any political risks in order to waltz into Downing Street. Polling showed for the best part of two years that Labour were heading for No.10, and the public resentment towards the Conservative Party was deep-rooted and irreversible. But its safe campaign was also equally down to the economic malaise they knew they would inherit; a 1997-style new dawn this was not, the fiscal and economic leverage available a fraction of what a new government would hope. An inability to provide short-term sunlit uplands was inevitable, so expectations had to be managed.

The public feel disappointed and, in some quarters, perhaps somewhat short-changed. Just one in seven (15%) have noticed any improvement in the cost of living since Labour came into government and, on the whole, a third (35%) of the country say things have gotten worse since Labour came in than they were under the Conservatives.

Of course, from a pure policy standpoint, Labour have broadly done what they promised: very little, but with very little room to manoeuvre. This was to be broadly expected (we were warned!). There will be more doom and gloom to come (we were warned!) with a Budget on the horizon. Labour is playing a long game, staking short-term unpopularity, which some would say was inevitable (we were warned!), for a longer-term ability to improve living standards, in the hope that the public feel the benefit in time to reward the party at the ballot box in four- or five-years’ time.

But there are other reasons why there’s a damning public verdict on Labour’s centenary of days in power. If you build a campaign based on restoring public trust, you have to be squeaky clean, holier than thou, in office. ‘Scandals’, if we can call them that, around donations for clothing, hospitality and other gifts have dogged Labour in office, to the tune of four in ten (39%) saying that general competence and trust in government has gotten worse under Labour than it ever did under the Tories.

My personal view is that these issues have been of Labour’s doing. Cronyism, donations and hospitality stories are Teflon to the Conservatives, but Labour’s inability to manage this has made it stick. Throw in stories of in-fighting among staff (leading to Sue Gray’s departure), and it just tells the public that this lot are just as bad as the ones before. This is all the more damaging when your election campaign was so heavily centered on your ability to provide the country with the grown-up leadership it so desperately craved.

Labour now has an uphill public opinion battle. The goodwill of July has all-but dissipated, leaving Starmer’s net favourability rating 28 points lower than it was at the end of Labour’s honeymoon period, and with the same ratings for key Cabinet colleagues also suffering. Public opinion is fickle, and approval is far easier to lose than win – just ask Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. Donations, Sue Gray, even the winter fuel policy controversy (our polling shows some of the dimmest views of Labour’s start in government come from over 55s) may end up being forgotten, but recovering from a bad start is easier said than done.

It is clear that Labour’s first three months in office have severely disappointed. But it’s unlikely that their first 100 days will matter in and of itself, when the public return to the ballot box. Too much will change between now and then, including a new Conservative leadership, for any voter to realistically judge Labour at the next election based on these first 100 days. But if Labour continues to expectation-manage to the extent it currently is, it risks its own doom and gloom becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that’s when short-term unpopularity can set, making it all the harder to reverse.