Starmer struggles to counter Johnson’s ‘vaccine bounce’ as polls loom

As Sir Keir Starmer’s first anniversary as Labour leader approached on April 4, he told colleagues of the frustrations of running Britain’s main opposition party during a global pandemic. “I’ve only done speeches to an empty room, in front of a bored cameraman,” he said. “I’ve not been clapped — or booed.”

Now Starmer is about to face his first test at the ballot box with real voters.

A vast set of local elections across Britain on May 6, with about 5,000 posts up for grabs across England alone, were last year viewed with trepidation in Downing Street: they were seen as an unwelcome nationwide referendum on Boris Johnson’s stumbling handling of the Covid-19 crisis. The successful vaccine rollout this year has changed the political dynamic.

Johnson’s “vaccine bounce” in the polls means the pressure is on Starmer. His approval ratings are in sharp decline and there are ominous signs on the doorstep that Labour voters who switched to the Tories en masse at the 2019 general election are, so far, showing little inclination of returning to the fold. 

“It’s going to be tough,” says one member of the shadow cabinet. “Our conversations with voters suggest Boris is getting the benefit of the doubt, reinforced by the vaccine success. There aren’t yet many 2019 Tory voters rushing back to Labour.”

The battleground on May 6 may be diverse, but every adult in Britain will have at least one vote in what is also Johnson’s first electoral test since his 2019 general election victory. Elections to the Scottish parliament and Welsh Senedd have their own dynamics, and challenges for Labour, but some of the most totemic contests will take place in England.

Labour looks certain to hold on to its metro mayors in the big cities of Greater London and Greater Manchester, where Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham respectively are runaway favourites. But Starmer needs to make gains outside of its cosmopolitan, ethnically diverse redoubts.

The party’s progress under Starmer will be tested across a range of elections, from city and metro mayor contests, to rural county council seats, the London assembly, police and crime commissioners, not to mention a problematic parliamentary by-election in Hartlepool.

Perhaps the biggest bellwether contest is in the West Midlands, where Tory mayor and former John Lewis executive Andy Street is defending a majority of just over 6,000 in a region that traditionally swings between blue and red. Labour strategists are privately pessimistic.

Meanwhile Tory cabinet ministers, when they venture out of London, seem drawn inexorably to Tees Valley in north-east England, where Tory mayor Ben Houchen is defending a majority of less than 500, and is the poster boy for the story of how the party broke through Labour’s “red wall”.

Labour is again pessimistic it can reclaim an area that for the Conservatives has become a kind of political Shangri-La, recently endowed by chancellor Rishi Sunak with a freeport and a new “Treasury North” campus at Darlington.

Meanwhile, in Hartlepool, a constituency in the Tees Valley mayoralty once held by former Labour MP Peter Mandelson, Labour is defending a 3,595 majority in a seat once regarded as impregnable. But a large Brexit party vote in 2019 is up for grabs and a Survation phone survey in the constituency this week put the Tories ahead.

Starmer, whose Ipsos Mori net approval rating dived from +31 last June to -9 last month, is now facing pressure from the Labour left. Former shadow cabinet member Richard Burgon has claimed that Starmer shows more zeal in fighting the Corbynite left than taking on “a Tory government responsible for one of the worst coronavirus death rates in the world”.

The rebuilding task is urgent: Starmer has instructed his party to be on alert for Johnson to hold a snap election as early as 2023. Even allowing for the usual management of expectations, Labour strategists see the May 6 polls at best as a chance to stop the rot.

Despite sizeable Tory national opinion poll leads, some in double figures, Conservative party chair Amanda Milling has tried to dampen expectations, arguing that in 2017, when many of these seats were last contested, the Tories won 60 per cent of English seats up for grabs.

That means the Tories are defending seats acquired at the high water mark of Theresa May’s leadership, although the picture is muddied by the fact that some seats up for election on May 6 were last contested in 2016, when Corbyn secured 47 per cent of seats. Last year’s local elections were postponed because of the pandemic.

Milling told the Financial Times that if the Tories were to do well on May 6 after 11 years in office, it would defy political gravity. She pointed out that after 11 years of power Margaret Thatcher’s Tories had lost 3,000 council seats while after 10 years of Tony Blair’s government, Labour had lost more than 4,000.

The elections also present an opportunity and a test for Sir Ed Davey, Liberal Democrat leader, still trying to rebuild his party’s fortunes. Elected leader last August, he too has struggled to penetrate the national consciousness during the pandemic.

But Robert Hayward, a Conservative peer and local election expert, argued that Johnson’s “vaccine bounce” was likely to prove powerful in these elections.

“The shift towards the Tories has been most marked among the older age groups, who happen to be the people who have been vaccinated and who vote,” he said.