Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer. Credit: Leon Neal/Getty
“Boris Johnson just lost the next election”. That was one view in the aftermath of the revelation that Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s senior advisor, had violated the rules of the lockdown.
It was echoed by others. Writing in the Observer, Andrew Rawnsley contended that the Cummings episode ticked all three boxes that determine whether or not scandals evolve into a ‘consequential episode’: it cut through in a big way; it changed how people see the government; and it redefined public opinion in a way that is “enduringly bad”.
There is no doubt that the scandal met some of Rawnsley’s criteria. Lots of people did notice the story and when they were asked whether or not they thought Cummings should have been sacked, most said yes. The general violation of our collective sense of ‘fair play’, long seen as a key ingredient of British culture, has also impacted the polls.
In the week before the story broke, Johnson’s party averaged 48% of the vote and a 15-point lead; in the polls since they have averaged 43% of the vote and a 6-point lead. If you want to put a figure on the cost of Cummings, then it is around 5 percentage points.
But even so, is this really the game-changer that many think? I’m not convinced. For one thing, we often award scandals a level of importance that is wholly disproportionate to their actual significance. We forget this now, but the Conservatives were re-elected after the Suez crisis, Labour were re-elected after David Kelly and Iraq, and Donald Trump was elected after boasting about groping women.
Even far-reaching scandals like the expenses fiasco, which would presumably also meet Rawnsley’s criteria, turned out to have only a fleeting impact; one study found ‘no evidence of any lasting effect’.
Then there is the way the Cummings scandal is already being diluted by our media’s very different treatment of the George Floyd protests. Even if you support the protestors who demonstrate purpose, as I do, the difference in the coverage is striking.
Just a week after its spluttering outrage over the Cummings affair, BBC’s News at Ten moved to covering mass protests in London while not even mentioning social distancing at all. “Ah but that is false equivalence,” said one person on Twitter.
Why is it false equivalence? Are we incapable of protesting while distancing? Are we allowed to do as we please so long as the cause is considered virtuous? One by-product of the British cherishing fair play is that they loathe hypocrisy.
But there are also other, more important reasons to be sceptical about the duration of the Cummings effect. In today’s more polarised political age, in which our values and identities keep us glued to our party of choice and provide a filter through which we interpret events, the idea that scandals will have such far-reaching effects feels increasingly implausible.
You can already see it in the polls. Perhaps what is so striking is not that the Conservatives have lost a few points, but rather how stable their support has been. Throughout the entire Covid crisis, and the Cummings episode, the incumbent party has not once dropped below 40%, a threshold that many past Conservative leaders would have given an arm for.
As I write, the party is averaging exactly the same level of support that it won at the election six months ago. The ‘rally effect’ that saw voters unite around the Government in the early phase of the crisis has worn off. But a disaster for Johnson? I don’t think so.
Nor is there much evidence that the ‘Johnson coalition’ — that curious alliance between blue-collar workers and southern conservatives — has been disrupted. In the latest post-scandal polls ,the Conservatives not only hold a solid-lead over Labour but a 63-point lead among Leavers, a 12-point lead among the working-class, and a 26-point lead in non-London, southern England.
If Johnson can hold these kinds of leads after the generally poor management of the coronavirus crisis, and the scandal over Cummings, then this suggests that his appeal runs deep.
It also speaks to a more important point that has largely been ignored amid all the hysteria and hype. Labour’s position in the polls has improved but there remains little evidence that it has done so among the key groups that will decide the next election.
The party is currently picking off low-hanging fruit; younger voters, ex-Liberal Democrats, disillusioned Remainers and Londoners. Their support is generally up across the board, but we have yet to see anything like the gains that will be needed to turn this ship around. Many people who have spent the past week talking about the ‘game changer’ already live in Labour seats. Many have yet to grasp the true scale of the challenge before them in order to bring about a return to majority government. I have yet to see a single serious proposal for winning back the working-class.
One reason why Boris Johnson has more breathing space than his critics would have you believe is because Labour has lost not one but two Red Walls. The first fell in Scotland; the second in northern England. In 2010, the election before Keir Starmer was selected to represent his north London constituents, Labour won 42% of the vote in Scotland and 41 seats. By 2019, it was down to less than 19% of the vote and just one seat.
This week, in the polls, there is absolutely no evidence of a recovery in Scotland. The party is in a distant third place, languishing on 13% of the vote; it is 5-points adrift of where Labour was in December, 9-points adrift of the Tories and 41-points adrift of the SNP.
This brings us to the second massive problem that has haunted the Labour Party for nearly two decades and will ultimately decide whether or not Starmer will become Prime Minister: England.
Take away seats in London, university towns and in highly diverse areas of the country, most of which Labour already controls, and the party is left with a rather barren landscape. Labour has not won the popular vote in England since 2001. Let me say that again. Labour has not won the popular vote in England since 2001. By the next election, Labour will not won have won the vote among the English for nearly a quarter-century.
And why is this? Most of these voters are conflicted or, in academic jargon, ‘cross-pressured’. They lean Left on the economy but lean Right on culture. So far, Labour has shown zero interest in speaking to them on the culture dimension because in the world of the Labour Party, to do so is tantamount to pandering to racism.
And so when these socially conservative English voters who don’t live in London looked at Labour’s general wokery — David Lammy’s endless virtue-signalling on Twitter, the Corbynistas praising ‘Luxury Communism’ and with Emily Thornberry’s dismissal still ringing in their ear — they walked into the polling station and said ‘no thanks’ to Labour. The party’s vote in England crashed by 8-points in 2019.
In the latest YouGov, Labour still trails Boris Johnson and his party by a sobering 26-points across southern England. With Scotland gone, and the SNP’s social liberalism a formidable barrier to any recovery, Keir Starmer and Labour somehow have to find a way of staging a rather miraculous advance in England and Wales.
This means building a Red Bridge to the Red Wall. But that means talking to those English who exhibit everything that makes Labour’s London-centric MPs and activists so uncomfortable: a strong attachment to an English rather than a British identity; a desire to slow (not end) immigration; a strong emphasis on the nation; a firm desire to uphold national traditions, myths and symbols; and a quiet yet deep patriotism that is qualitatively distinct from the ‘ethnic nationalism’ and ‘racism’ that Labour associate with England. It is a world that puts flag and family first and which has almost no interest in joining The Great Awokening. And it would most likely give Cummings a free pass rather than open the door to a replay of the New Labour years.
Will Keir Starmer, who pushed so hard for a second referendum, be able to recapture this territory? Does Labour have the vocabulary that is required to speak to the English who have spent the past decade putting their cultural concerns ahead of their economic concerns? And how can Labour build a solid and sustainable bridge between Remainia and Leave Land? These are the questions that will decide the next election, not the antics of individual advisors.
Matthew Goodwin is Professor of Politics at the University of Kent. His new book, Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics, is out on March 30.
GoodwinMJ 
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SubscribeWell polls are somewhat meaningless when we are, probably, at least three or four years from the next election. Two other points:
– many people I talk to have no problem with Cummings’ actions, not least because we believe the whole isolation thing to have been an insane nonsense anyway
– Labour will not win the popular vote as long they continue to openly support the interests of criminals over the law abiding, shirkers over workers, the public sector over the private sector, big business over small business, foreigners over the British, more tax over less tax etc. On every issue of policy and morality, Labour has been on the wrong side since 1997, and most people know that (even, I suspect, most people who vote for them).
Last Saturday BBC Parliament showed the 1997 Election program. I was watching the part from the Friday morning when the BBC had Callaghan, Kinnock and a few other figures from Labour’s past on. They where gushing about Blair. The most interesting thing was how badly those gushing words have aged in light of how Blair ruled!
Unfortunately personally lovely, but utterly useless John Major handed it to him on a plate.
I would agree. His government collapsed after “Black Wednesday”. A stronger PM would have been able to use the economic recovery that created to at lest hold Blair to one term.
That’s before you get into his EU strategy. Which history has shown as untenable. The referendum result had its roots in Maastricht.
Yes it was the Maastricht treaty that did it for me. Unlike the erstwhile ken clarke, I actually read it, with a sense of foreboding…
A lot of people became Eurosceptical as a result of Maastricht and watched With horror as the EU became ever more remote and intolerant over the years culminating in the rejection by the people of the constitution only to see it forced through as Lisbon Treaty.
and the CP were arrogant and various people out of control, the pre socially re-engineered Portillo to name one. There was a grotty feel to them and Majors incompetence the icing on the cake.
Agreed by 1997, the whole CP was, as the late Terry Thomas would have said, “an absolute shower”.
Each to their own of course but, “personally lovely”? Blair was likely, the most devious, narcissistic and entirely self-interested PM the UK has ever experienced. Money, money, money, money – which he managed (somehow) to acquire – self-aggrandising power – and by his own admission Presidency of the EU – for which he crawled to every EU instruction and sold out the UK. Blair the great Quisling!
I think you may have misunderstand me. I was referring to John Major (slightly facetiously) not Tony Blair.
However I fully concur with your trenchant views on the Blair creature.
To use the vernacular, a truly revolting piece of work.
.
Most of the furore over Cummings seemed like hate to me, hate from the media and those on the left, they hate him for his role in brexit and saw a chance to take revenge, it was a great day when I realised those haters had been thwarted yet again, and the media showed themselves to be the clowns they are.
I have seen several articles on the Dominic Cummings 260 mile drive ranging from the supportive through those that attack every aspect of him as a person right through to the downright stupid eg I saw one article comparing it to the Profumo affair! (Driving 260 miles is the same as the Minister of Defence sharing a mistress with a KGB agent!! Some journalists are becoming unhinged in lockdown!).
I suspect the outcome of this will be exactly the same as the outcome of the Andy Coulson affair. Political nerds (like me) are nodding right now but those who don’t remember, Coulson was the editor of the New of the World when that paper was hacking mobile phones and he left the paper under a dark cloud. Cameron took him on as his spin doctor only to have to sack him when it became obvious he knew about the hacking. He later went to jail for his part in the scandal. The Labour Party, the media and the left in general spent years trying to hang the scandal around Cameron’s neck. It had no effect on the 2015 electorate because they didn’t really care about Cameron’s choice of spin doctor.
The political bubble is obsessed with Cummings because they hate him for the 2016 referendum result. A large majority of those who voted Conservative in 2019 voted leave in 2016 and Cummings is a hero to them!
They are also the same culprits who nearly destroyed our democracy last year – the Remainers/Rejoiners i.e. all TV channels, the newspapers, Labour, LibDems etc. It is orchestrated too, given that Saddiq Khan is getting involved and given away by about 10 Labour MPs tweeting exactly the same message! The Cummings Affair was someone they thought they could get rid of to weaken the government enough to push through a law to cancel Brexit in some way. Luckily, it hasn’t worked.
He is a hero to me!
He is very good at what he does and the hatred the left display towards him shows it.
Also to many, many people with whom I have contact. All are social conservatives, who value an independent, critical thinker and most of all, find his patriotism ‘heroic’.
“So far, Labour has shown zero interest in speaking to them on the culture dimension because in the world of the Labour Party, to do so is tantamount to pandering to racism.” I would add that their LGBT / Transgender ideology…and the disastrous outing of all the female candidates in the leadership election to proclaim ‘transwomen are women’ alienated the working class and biological women in droves. The inquiry into the implosion of the Liberal Democrats at the last General Election, made it absolutely clear that this issue in particular was the undoing of Jo Swinson. The Labour Party, the Lib Dems and the Greens have lost the courage of their convictions to acknowledge the real experiences of ordinary people and to uphold free speech in favour of pandering to the virtual signaling of the woke minority.
A Syrian friend living in Dubai asked me what UK was like. How long have you got? I said. There’s the North and South, East and West, London, Scotland England Wales, Conservative Labour and LibDems, Brexiters Remainers, CofE Catholics Muslims Hindus, blacks, asians whites Yorkists Lancashires, Liverpudlians and Norwich, Oxford Cambridge not forgetting Cornwall….but Scotland is North and Wales is west yes? No no no it’s not like that ho ho… We’ve got an Indian Tory Home Secretary Brexiteer from Uganda and a communist white remainer First Minister of Scotland…How do you all get on? he said. We don’t. We hate each other. We’re like the old Bedouin. But it’s a nice place to live and people come and risk their lives in rubber dinghies to get there.
Sturgeon is a communist now?
She always was.
And always will be. Amen.
More National Socialist I suspect; but there is little to choose between the two.
Hahaha 😅
You forgot the Midlands
Interesting piece. However, I’ve long thought that elections aren’t decided by broad underlying trends, as this article implies, but by what happens in the few months and weeks leading up to the election (2017 is a case in point). So my real beef with the “Boris Johnson just lost the next election” claim is that nobody knows anything about where we’ll be in 2024, and they should frankly admit as much.
Hopefully, by 2024 ‘our’ Tanks will be parked on Tiananmen Square.
The Labour Party has ceased to be a party that wants to govern. It is a party of protest and little more. Over the last few weeks they have failed to put together a single coherent policy, let alone offer one to the electorate.
It was the Labour Party under Harold Wilson in 1975 who gave us the Referendum, despite the previous Labour PM Clement Atlee describing Referendums as ” a device of dictators and demagogues “
Wilson is often praised for keeping us out of the Vietnam War (not that the US would have wanted or indeed needed us).
However he did idiotically commit us to a thirty year war in Ulster, and give us the wretched idea of a Referendum. At the time most of us were astonished, believing it to be the government’s prerogative to govern and let the rest of us get on with
our lives.
No wonder Labour is in its death throes.
One reason missed in the article is why Labour will not progress and that is the unions. I suggest many people of all stripes can understand that genuine Socialism has some sensible merits. However, when the leaders of the more excitable unions launch their so, so predictable objections to any change in the status quo only the activists are listening. When the usual diatribe about, workers rights, equality and so on even die hard Union members must roll their eyes. It’s been spouted endlessly for decades and has no meaning to people who actually work.
The failure of the Unions is that they are run by people who adopt a faux working class demeanour, quite out keeping with their backgrounds. Worker’s have never been enamoured with the cloth cap Northern ‘Down ‘t’ pit voice. This hard working, tough no nonsense image was never a reality. Only the Union leaders can’t grasp that.
The reason for their continued existence is the way members are steered to elect their chosen candidates into positions of power that they believe will give them control. So progressive Socialist ideas that could benefit everyone will never happen until the Unions finally cease to exist.
Good point but it’s not just the leadership of the Unions but their composition as well. The majority of Unioinsed industries are now middle class professionals, mostly in the civil service. They have little, if anything in common with the Unions of old.
unions are a Ponzi system now.
Still too few Trades Unions help their members to win the race against automation by facilitating lifelong learning by teaming up with colleges and universities.
No doubt they’ll blame Thatcher when the go extinct.
Nippy is Boris’ only real political enemy. In a piece by ‘Sky Views’ today, Ms Sturgeon was asked if she thought Mr Trump was a racist. Sure enough, she squeaked in a ‘Boris hates muslims’ anecdote. The MSM love this woke stuff; but when one expects inherent antagonism and bias from these weirdos, it fades almost immediately in one’s memory. The story is an old one. And a tired one.
As for Der Starmer and Co.., that Canterbury MP playing illlicit Carry-On-Dr Nookie must’ve made them wince a bit but of course no outpouring of outrage in the MSM (DM excepted) (and a clear cut breaking of lockdown -for recreation/pleasure) – but shhhh — no! she’s a good guy! She’s labour and apologised and to be immediately forgiven by “Toenails” Robinson, Dandy Peston, “Breakin'” Beff and the rest of the rotten shower. Actually, to pass out some credit, my only socialist pal was fuming about the Hon. Lady’s behaviour moreso than with DC’s.
This is how it goes. Que sera, sera. Ibid.
“Boris Johnson just lost the next election”
Just Liberal Establishment mind games on the back of a single poll.
These people think that everyone should think as they do and so when they saw the poll that unambiguously portrayed that a significant amount of people thought he should be sacked, then they cried gotcha and thought everyone was finally on their wavelength.
However not to be. We don’t want to be governed/managed by Race Ideologues or Trans Ideologues, EU Ideologues, Socialist Ideologues or any Ideologues at all.
The Labour Party will need to change the ideology of most of its MPs before they will ever be in power again.
Anyone who looks at the Cummings saga with an open mind will agree that he did nothing untoward and has been treated despicably by the left and the MSM.
people of the UK are a conservative (c) group who have seen many changes that we are not comfortable with.
All governments have ups and downs but the fundamentals remain. There has been much talk of the government’s handling of the COVID emergency and yet when asked if lockdown was correct a majority say yes. That is what will be remembered in 4 years time not rows about PPE. And now we have the riots from BLM activists. Will they hurt Labour? I think yes because the majority want law and order and they blame the left for bringing chaos to our streets. The left think that all of the pictures from the weekend improves their standing. It does not. The crisis that may swing the next election has yet to happen.
Excellent analysis. But we’ll only know the answer with hindsight. Looking back at past governments – who all failed at some point, there is a point where the mood turns, their luck runs out and they can get nothing right. The Tories haven’t reached that point yet, but if they lose a reputation for basic competence, the wind turns against them.
Labour haven’t yet properly addressed the public perception that they have been hijacked as a mainstream political party.
Jeez, he’s been in charged for 8 weeks. Give the guy a chance. Also, as Matthew knows, leadership ratings are a much better guide to electoral performance. These are very different from the Con vs Lab polls.
As elections become increasingly presidential, it comes down to charisma of the leader. Whatever his policies, Boris is charismatic. Jacinda Ardern achieved a 15 point jump in a few weeks in 2017 just by having a nice smile and being kind. That support has not really dropped despite a failure to deliver on almost every key manifesto promise. Corbyn had it, but only to a narrow group. If Starmer doesn’t, Labour are doomed. Although, do not underestimate the power of a crisis with almost 100% political screen time going to Boris. This should be worth more than he has achieved
When one spends a 69-year lifetime trying to navigate progressively between left and right, as I have, the outcome is (guess what): middle.
Middle class, middle of the road political values.
This American baccalaureted English major spent 35 adult years as a carpenter. . .to put bread on the table for wife and three smart kids.
When kid #3 entered middle school . . . baccalaurated (psych) wife-mother attended nursing school part-time, which enabled 22 years as an ICU nurse, and . . . a ticket for hubby to spend golden years as gentleman scholar who can construct a set of stairs or rebuild a toilet.
My voice of experience says: not a bad life at all. Lifetime learning while raising a family to be lifelong learners. It’s the way to go.
Mary, thanks for sharing this. Your perspective is uniquely balanced and helpful. Keep up the good work.
Left and Right are 2 over-lapping ideas.
We need to get rid of both!
Now!
Britain is different to the US.
And long may that remain!
Will the Cummings “event” lose the election? No. Will the fallout from that event cause serious damage to observation of lockdown and subsequent rules? Almost certainly yes. Will that affect the evaluation of government performance (“world beating”, or “world trailing”?) also probably yes. Will that affect the outcome of the election? Yes.
And will Johnson’s appalling mismanagement of “the event” affect the outcome of the election? Yes
I am afraid there are a lot of people who don’t think it has been handled “appallingly”. Not perfect but nothing is.
Moreover, the dividing lines are remarkably consistent. None of us expect perfection in leaders. They are as fallible as the rest of us.
What most voted for is general direction of travel, not meaningless spats in social media. In that, not much, other than a rather more Liberal Conservative party than some like, has changed.
I tend to agree. I don’t see Labour bouncing back unless there is a change in national attitude. Certainly the enthusiasm by politicos of the two main sides seemingly for things that are obviously wrong or unsupported by any evidence shows it’s not possible to move people who can always find succour in newspapers and demagogues.
It’s a lunatic asylum to those of us unaligned. Reading loons call Sturgeon communist and write nonsense about the Cons representing workers over shirkers – when their support is from the biggest welfare recipients and beneficiaries of loose money policies at the expense of workers especially the young. Not to mention their love of monopoly business and using state spending as subsidy. Today the biggest con of the last Labour Govt more new hospitals, needed or not, likely with a nice fat cheque for financiers every year no doubt. It does seem very few people believe in actual Capitalism nowadays for all the donning of the garb by the right and Libertarians whilst simultaneously supporting its opposite.
There is a lot of rational analysis and good academic work left alone as both parties grab at an awkward mixture of nutcasery and flawed visionaries like a Cummings or Socialism or I assume Starmer will go back to the lunacy of neo Liberalism that led us here.