1992 was, according to Fukuyama, the End of History. That would leave John Major the last of the British Prime Ministers as we knew them.

From the collapse of the Soviet Union and the apparently conclusive victory of American imperialism, it was understood there must be forged a new future, a new kind of history. Upon the untimely death of the Leader of the Opposition John Smith in 1994, Tony Blair offered himself up as the man with the answers.

In an age dictated by tabloid mistruths, Blair established a modern approach to politics: the New Labour government would not engage with the media, it would become itself the media.

*

Labour has returned in 2024, and history has been relentless.

Johnson and Truss. Trump and Orbán. Putin, Meloni, Le Pen. Die Alternative für Deutschland.

In a counterattack on the Labour-Democratic liberal project of circa 1989 to the mid noughties, the 2010s produced a horde of neo-fascist ideologues, grifters, con artists. Much of the world is still grappling with them today. Their popularity – and in many cases, governance – has created immediate and lasting consequences for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable.

With the long-term impacts of their assaults on politics and culture still largely immeasurable, the centre-left parties of the West are finally arriving at a troubling consensus: if the far-right is immovable, then we must adapt around it.

Post-neoliberal. Post-postmodern. A new centrist political culture is emerging in 2024, the biggest election year in history. Not from a public mandate for a specific kind of value system, but as a decade-late retaliation to the era of right-wing populism and, more recently, left-wing apathy. Responding directly to an age of impunity, incompetence, division and egomania, its tenets are responsibility, pragmatism, unity among left and right, and public service.

After a series of cataclysmic failures rooted in corruption and self-interest, the United Kingdom recently shed itself of the Conservative Party, giving rise to a more concentrated party of fascists under the leadership of political cockroach Nigel Farage. The pendulum swung away from the Tories and towards Labour, but with no one party left satisfied with a mandate except Reform UK.

Starmer’s new Labour, not to be confused with Blair’s New Labour, won Westminster with an uncomfortable 33.7 per cent of the vote share. The Tories were beaten down to just 23.7 per cent, almost twenty per cent down from the populist election of 2019. Meanwhile, a third party has risen above the Liberal Democrats by two per cent: Reform UK, with 14.3 per cent of the national share of votes.

July was a tight win for Labour, which has successfully, just about, barely, by the skin of its teeth seen off a more significant rise of the populist far-right.

In the USA, derailing the Trump train and loosely following the Starmer blueprint, Harris Walz might just do the same in November.

Amid all this populist noise – as seen in Musk’s rallying of violence against Britain’s immigrants and in Trump’s elitist appeasement of America’s disenfranchised, and globally, for years, by men like Erdoğan and Bolsonaro – Starmer has seized the chance to present to the public a new kind of politics.

Boring. Normal. Competent. The new wave of Western growth hopes to be led by safe, sensible prosecutors.

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The genius of Starmer’s appeal is that there is no appeal. Voters did not elect Starmer’s Labour on merit. No one was enthralled, twenty-seven years post-Blair, by the Labour Party’s undefined vision for Britain. This Labour Party would not manage the media, but instead bore it, and the electorate, to the extreme of indifference.

The Starmerite solution to the roaring theatrics of populism: quiet competence.

Having found a precarious strategy to defeat right-wing populism, Starmer walked his centrist Ming vase all the way to Downing Street.

Perhaps he is right. After all, uncomfortable though the vote share may be, he did win the election. Perhaps this – boringness, normalcy, carefulness, stability – is the future of Western politics, the best way to keep at bay the far-right populism which has blighted democratic nations for a decade. If Kamala Harris can achieve the same feat with the same means, that theory will prove golden.

It’s early days for this post-populist centrist zeitgeist, and it is faced with unprecedented existential threats. We live in a state of perpetual global crises, and the internet has moulded an intergenerational distrust of facts.

Social media is rotten with rhetoric about a pandemic hoax, blood-sucking Democrats, gerrymandered elections. On TikTok, Facebook and X, reaching demographics from the elderly to the youth, Enoch Powell and the Great Replacement Theory that the white British race is being eroded with a view to being replaced by migrants, has been spreading rapidly for years. Across the UK, poorly educated voters anticipate a coming race war: a literal war, in which ‘Islamists’, like sleeper cells, will rise and fight the white race for jurisdiction over Great Britain. These views are not as fringe as you think. Look around you, and listen.

Harris might be on track to defeat Trump, but the fate of MAGA Republicans is not the point. There is a mandate across the globe for cruelty. For the British government, every day between now and 2029 must be considered a campaign for the public to re-elect the Labour Party.

As of now, Labour is failing in that mission. Governing well is not enough, and appeasement of these fascist tendencies is not an option. Herein lies the lesson Starmer ought to take from Blair’s modernisation project.

*

Ask me my three priorities for this government and I tell you: communication, communication, communication.

Communications, messaging, perception management, ‘spin’ is the act of presenting information to the public in a way favourable to the information provider.

New Labour ran on spin. Its infamous spin doctor, Director of Communications Alastair Campbell, worked doggedly, obstinately, often violently, to proselytise the public to a positive perception of Blair’s plan to drag the UK by its heels into the twenty-first century.

Campbell managed New Labour’s communications, its policy messaging, its public perception. Scouted by Blair for his media competence and not least for his unwavering loyalty, the Blairite evangelist prepared slogans and statements, handled crises and scandals with wordsmithery and Scottish aura, a vicious terrier in an oversized suit.

New Labour galvanised the British public to engage positively with politics for the first and perhaps last time, with Blair on legislation and Campbell on legislating the legislators, throwing bones to the media, making and sustaining good public relations.

During this summer’s parliamentary recess, Starmer has been careful with his words. He talks of resetting a relationship with Europe, though with no plans to return to the European customs union. During the racist riots, he swerved an opening to draw attention to what was often specifically Islamophobic violence. He’s reiterated time and again the horrendous state of the departments his ministers now administrate, and has peddled party lines about growth, black holes, and restoration.

From a rose garden with a thorny past, the new Prime Minister delivered a speech featuring heavily the words ‘honest,’ ‘honestly,’ ‘genuine,’ ‘genuinely’ and even a rogue ‘literally.’ He strains to tell us that things are going to get worse before they get better, and that he’s calling on us all to suffer temporarily while the government fixes the foundations of a house in disrepair.

Is there a spin doctor in the house?

No one at Labour HQ seems willing to manage public perceptions. The rose garden speech lacks a vital piece of spin.

There are two clear messages, pieces of communication, to be taken from this public address:

1.
The foundations of this country are damaged and need repairing, which will take time and money, meaning further hardship for the taxpayer.

2.
The Prime Minister is being honest in telling you this at all.

There remains a glaring chasm. A lack of the third message. The most important one.

Because after this difficult period of significant public spending, after the sustained suffering of the British public, what will it all have been for? What does Labour want Britain to look like, to behave like, to feel like to live in by 2029 and beyond?

What is any of this actually for?

*

Starmer’s anti-populist appeal to the public is essentially this:

I am not like them.
I trade in simple words, frank terms, and honesty.
I put country before party.
I am a public servant, not a politician.

The cause is certainly honourable. A Prime Minister who serves the country before his party. A party which serves the public before itself.

This iteration of Labour government is resolute that there will be no populism, less spin, and no return to the media-orientated culture of New Labour.

There is limited spin in the Labour Party, but there is not quite no spin. The twenty-two billion pounds the Chancellor is adamant she’s missing is an effective bit of communication: ‘the money’s gone and the last government squandered it.’ That one’s a guaranteed winner, time-tested. Every government that came before this one said it and every government after this one will too. “To be honest with you,” says Starmer like a schoolboy in trouble, “we genuinely didn’t know.”

Where there isn’t any spin is in the government’s policy discussions. At no point during the election campaign, nor the rose garden speech, has Starmer formalised in words a plan for the future.

We are fixing Britain’s broken foundations, to quote his domicile analogy. Okay. How will we then redecorate? What do we have to look forward to? What does Starmerism basically seek to achieve?

The Democrats have not decided either.

The approach seems to be: win first, plan later.

*

Since the King’s Speech, there has been radio silence about the new government’s proposed legislature. At the tail end of the recess, we heard Starmer’s first clear message about the future of this country: it’s one where you won’t be allowed a cigarette with your pint.

On a warm Thursday evening in August, Starmer’s first real flirtation with a policy decision as Prime Minister was one which hands an open goal to the right-wing press. Because Labour is now, Daily Mail readers, threatening your civil liberties! Your very civic right to a carcinogenic treat on a summer evening!

Summer is cancelled, and with it, any semblance of a honeymoon period for Labour.

When the Prime Minister was met with questions about leaked information on the proposed outdoor smoking ban, which might see pub landlords forced to refuse cigarettes in their beer gardens, he offered no buffer to what would clearly become a contentious policy announcement.

Granted, the government was backed into a corner: stand by the leaked policy or don’t. But here’s where spin is needed.

Had Starmer, alongside announcing plans for an outdoor smoking ban, provided the buffer of another, more agreeable statement, the public’s coming retaliation would have been more tolerable to this infant government.

Spin makes a bitter pill like a smoking ban swallowable.

The spin here could range from a new policy announcement – perhaps the smartest, most Campbell-esque approach to media management – to a reiteration of Labour’s summer successes.

For example: a new plan from Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson regarding the future of state schools. Or a fresh detail about the homes which Deputy PM and Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government Angela Rayner intends to build. Even simply a reference to the end of Strike Britain, having settled the strikes which the Sunak government allowed to roll on for two years, costing millions and causing unnecessary, resolvable disruption to public transport and the NHS.

This government put an end to the junior doctors’ strikes, with an immediate sit-down and a realistic pay deal from Streeting’s Department of Health and Social Care.

Play on that. Play politics! Sweeten the pot which clearly needs sweetening, because Keir, the people do not like you very much, and they’re going to resent you for this.

*

Between his presentation as the garden-dwelling harbinger of doom and the man who made beer gardens smoke-free, Starmer is in dire need of a communications strategy.

Labour is in danger of feeling that it won on merit. There is no mandate for a centre-left government in this fascist-aligned country. This government has tiptoed into power and now relies on its actions, rather than communications, to do the talking. Noble, but reckless, given the gravity of the political culture in Britain and around the world, and the imperativeness of their re-election at the end of the decade.

Starmer is the unlikely pioneer of the new centrist order. He is the Prime Minister of a world-leading country at the most perilous, most pivotal juncture in the history of Western civilisation. With a six-month head-start over the United States, he has a unique opportunity to determine, envisage and shape the future of humanity. His burden is that he must, he must, ensure that the far-right does not return to the fore in the 2030s.

Months into its existence, years before significant change to the lives of Britons, the new Labour government is ailed with an affliction unfortunately rooted in its fundamental core of honesty. If unremedied, it might inadvertently precipitate a generation of global suffering.

It’s ironic that this might be their fatal flaw. Laughable to those who reflect on the New Labour of Blair and Campbell, lamentable to those who glimpse ahead and see far-right victories if this centrist project fails.

The Labour Party needs a spin doctor.