“My centre is giving way. My right is retreating. Situation excellent. I attack.” The defiant optimism of Ferdinand Foch, French commander in the first Battle of the Marne in 1914, only slightly altered – “my centre is giving way, my left is revolting,” perhaps – provides good advice for Labour on this wild week.
With Labour losing ground to Nigel Farage and Reform, the left demoralised and the Liberal Democrats picking up disillusioned progressives; with the White House turning the screw on trade; and with all our economic numbers flashing red – well, this is the perfect moment for the Prime Minister to finally find his voice and move decisively.
I am writing before the local election and by-election results, but the early signs are that Britain is experiencing a violent political fracturing that we haven’t seen for some time. The political sage John Curtice compares it to a century ago, the 1920s, and the great Liberal split, which allowed the emergence of Labour in the first place. That would suggest a complete reshaping of British politics.
Others feel this moment is more like the rise of the Social Democratic Party in the early 1980s, which threatened a dramatic reshaping, the end of two-party politics – but then fizzled out. Are the egos and tensions at the top of Reform UK not a little similar to the feuds inside the Social Democratic “Gang of Four”, with Farage, perhaps, playing the charismatic David Owen?
Whichever, this seems a curious moment to suggest that even a flicker of optimism should run through Downing Street: Britain’s economic performance remains so pathetic, and we are so surrounded by enemies, that surely these Starmer days mark some kind of political end point?
Indeed. But they should also be the end of caution, the end of Treasury orthodoxy, the beginning of boldness, the start of the counter-attack.
Let’s begin with Reform. Farage is both a helper and a danger for Keir Starmer. He demoralises the Tory family, many of whose media stars are defecting to his party. If Kemi Badenoch is ousted and replaced by Robert Jenrick, who hopes to reunite the right, then we can expect the two or three years ahead to be dominated by this futile and exhausting project.
It is futile for many reasons, but they include ideology – Reform, enthusiastic about nationalisation, often hostile to Ukraine, is a million miles away from Tory instincts – and strategy and personality. Farage wants to obliterate the Conservatives, not cuddle them.
Any attempt at an electoral pact or fusion between the Tories and Reform would involve so much static energy and repetitive rowing that it would infuriate the electorate and give Starmer his best chance, by far, of a second general election victory. Where Jenrick is right is that if the next general election produced a hung parliament in which Reform and the Tories could together form a government to keep Starmer out, they surely would. But the same is true of Labour and the Liberal Democrats, if the numbers fell that way. And the truth is, it’s too early for predictions, never mind plans.
So, why do I say that Farage is a danger to Starmer? Because even out of power, he is hugely influential on British politics, a one-man magnetic field affecting not just what the government prioritises, but how it does so.
The most obvious recent example is that the Home Office under Yvette Cooper has finally accepted the case for the overseas processing of asylum claims. No Rwanda scheme, hers, but a shrewder plan, with the approval of the UN high commissioner for refugees, to pay Balkan countries to temporarily house people claiming asylum in the UK. The formidable and energetic former British ambassador in Washington Karen Pierce, now working on Balkans policy in the Foreign Office, is likely to be a key player.
If this, combined with Cooper’s anti-gang measures, has a visible impact on the number of illegal boat crossings, that will be a major victory for Starmer over Reform. But UN-stamped or not, and however in line with the thinking of other European countries, the policy will still horrify liberal progressives inside Labour who have come to loathe the Prime Minister.
The far bigger issue is Europe. On 19 May in London there will be a crucial UK-EU summit to reset relations after Brexit. On the table is a new security and defence pact that will give British companies such as BAE Systems and Babcock access to €150bn of European defence spending. It would also mean new deals on migration, carbon trading and food and agricultural standards.
The agreement, not yet done, may yet collapse over fishing quotas or (less likely) youth mobility. It would mark exactly the kind of boldness many yearn to see from Starmer. He would be able to offer good, new industrial jobs; cheaper food; and eventually, cheaper energy costs and better border security.
He would also be exploiting a big shift in attitudes to the EU: 55 per cent now favour rejoining. With the signals flashing amber over any useful trade deal with the US, despite our best Trump flattery – worth anyway far less than half of the value of our European trade – the time for a bold deal is now.
But this, particularly if opposed by fishing communities, would be a deliberate punch on the nose for Reform voters and the right-wing media. Let’s be clear, an “attack” would be a gamble. The question is whether Farage is now such an intimidating figure that Starmer, in the end, backs off.
This is only the beginning of the Farage impact. Because the willingness of the EU for a new deal with the UK (the May summit could be just the first step) depends on Brussels’s reading of the tea leaves about British politics. Have they really changed? If the Commission, after looking at recent elections and polling, concludes that Farage is likely to be the next British leader, it won’t want to go far in welcoming Britain now. Reform’s influence is enormous.
Even so, the Donald Trump chaos gives the Prime Minister the chance to be consequential in a way he might not have expected last summer. The biggest unknown, of course, concerns our feeble economic growth and whether Rachel Reeves is prepared to make any moves beyond cheerless, repeated raids on welfare. The former deputy governor of the Bank of England, Minouche Shafik, told me recently she thinks Reeves should look again at taxes. The NatWest chairman, Howard Davies, believes the Trump tariff shock has given her space to rethink her famous fiscal rules. Neither is exactly a wild Corbynite. And something has to give.
Moving on Europe, achieving reform in the NHS, curbing migration and getting more money into people’s pockets – achieve all four and Starmer will be re-elected. Achieve none, and he’s over.
So, yes, I think this is time for a Foch lunge. He won that battle, by the way. It is still remembered in France as “the miracle of the Marne”, regarded by some historians as the most important land battle in European history. It was said at the time by the enemy commander Von Moltke to be the moment Germany lost the war.
But if that feels too grandiose advice for Starmer, how about some from Robert Harris’s excellent novel Precipice, which is about Herbert Asquith, the Liberal leader who quit parliamentary politics after the reset described above? These are, after all, precipice times. During the 1914 crisis, staring into his shaving mirror, Harris has Asquith muse that “two qualities were required to make a successful prime minister – first, the efficient despatch of business. And second, optimism”.
[See also: Keir Starmer needs an enemy within]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 30 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The War on Whitehall