Politicos love nothing better than inventing a people. For Bill Clinton in 1996 it was “soccer moms”, the term actually popularised by a Republican consultant, Alex Castellanos, to describe the voters that the Democrats were going out of their way to woo. For Tony Blair in the same year it was “Mondeo Man”, designating former Labour voters who had done well for themselves economically and now feared that the party would be an obstacle on their path to further prosperity.
This kind of psephological shorthand serves a number of purposes. One is that using the term makes election strategists look farsighted and savvy even if they weren’t: Castellanos is remembered for spreading the phrase, and less so for the fact that the campaign he advised proved incapable of stopping Clinton’s glide to re-election.
This is also a way of persuading your political party of a position that you want them to hold. The subtext of Blair’s “Mondeo Man” speech was this: the economic model that Margaret Thatcher had built and John Major had refined worked fine, and under him Labour’s mission would be to add well-funded public services on top, rather than fiddling with the underlying idea.
Although there are plenty of euphemisms for this formula — electorally successful leftwingers in the 1990s and 2000s liked to talk about the “Third Way”, because they found this more congenial than saying “we’re Thatcherites with a social conscience” — it’s the same one that powered the centre-left to renewed success after the victories of the New Right in the 1980s.
The absence today of an equivalent “big idea” is a source of considerable comfort to Conservatives contemplating the size of Sir Keir Starmer’s poll lead. Yes, Starmer has achieved a phenomenal turnround in his party’s position since becoming Labour leader in April 2020, but he has no project to compare to the Blair-Clinton Third Way.
The awkward truth for both Conservatives and Labourites is that there is no Starmerite equivalent to Blairism. This is difficult for Labour because it is not clear what the animating principle of a Starmer government will be, beyond competence and probity, which is nice, but it isn’t really an economic strategy. But it is painful for Conservatives too, because the reason Starmer can’t do a Blair and promise to keep the successful economic model the Tories have built is that there isn’t one. In fact, the biggest achievement of the 13 years of Tory government since 2010 has been to take the economic model Thatcher and Major built, already weakened by the financial crisis, and give it a great big stab in the heart with a knife labelled “Brexit”.
As a result, Starmer and Rishi Sunak both sound a lot like Harold Wilson, who in 1964 won an election to lead a country whose existing economic model looked creaky at best. There is an awful lot of nebulous chit-chat around right now about the importance of science and technology, but not a great deal as far as the actual vision thing goes. Both leaders share a belief that if they use some words they like a lot — “climate change” and “green” in the case of Starmer, “science” and “technology” for Sunak — eventually the UK will somehow develop a new economic model.
Their predicament can be seen in their own answer to Castellanos’ soccer moms and Blair’s Mondeo men. Starmer’s people are all about electoral arguments — “Stevenage Woman”, for instance, whose principal distinguishing feature seems to be that she is feeling hard hit by the rising cost of living and hasn’t had a decent pay rise in a decade, a condition that applies to most voters in the UK. Sunak’s people are those he hates — leftwing lawyers, north Londoners, the usual suspects.
That matters more than it seems: it’s not a coincidence that when the Conservative government still successfully made and implemented policy under David Cameron, it had a clear idea of whom it was for and whom it wanted to win over. He and his chancellor, George Osborne, relentlessly targeted those you might call the “Waitrose liberals”, people who had done pretty well for themselves out of the Thatcher-Major economic model, but also liked the social liberalism of the New Labour era.
Cameron’s successors often talk as if they dislike these voters even while not being a million miles from them personally. But they have yet to find or embrace a version of what the good life is that isn’t being a good Waitrose liberal with a nice job, a nice supermarket and a nice life. The absence of either a sense of the people they want to govern for or a plan for how to do it is one reason why British politics is likely to remain stuck for a while longer.