Labour’s comms team is inadvertently teaching Conservative counterparts a valuable lesson – don’t do it like this

I don’t hate the Labour Party. I disagree with them.

I don’t always agree with my own party – but that’s politics. I do however advocate talking to opponents, even being friends. This is not virtue signalling, it’s good strategy. I want to understand why they dislike Conservatism, why they believe their plan (so far as I can discern one) is better than ours (so far as I can, at the moment, get hold of one).

I want to understand my opponents and learn from their mistakes.

The world of strategic political communications, inhabited as it is by those William Saffire branded in a New York Times Magazine article in 1986 ‘spin-doctors’ should be no different.

There are varied schools of thought within political comms and some are too often expressed with a table spoon of cynicism and that sort of knowing, Peter Pan wink, that says, “oh the cleverness of me”.

Lesson one for any budding vanguard of Tory comms specialists might be to set aside some of the clever-clever stuff and borrow a political line that wasn’t that successful in its day – get ‘back to basics.’ Don’t focus on process but on outcomes. It’s not how much you’re spending it’s how many people you helped. It’s not about ‘you’, it’s about ‘we’. It’s not Government money, it’s your money. All good standards, too often forgotten.

Current Tory spin doctors are spending time putting Labour’s communications operation under the microscope. It’s worth it.

In recent months Labours comms outfit has been busy resetting after an appalling start.  If journalists got frustrated with our departmental political comms teams you should hear what they say about our Labour replacements. Stone walling, unresponsive and paranoid are some of the nicer phrases used.

To be fair their failure to be all over the Government’s delivery, plans, and narrative is not their fault. It’s the hardest thing in the world to construct if there’s so little to go on. The thing about Starmerism is there isn’t any Starmerism. A charge levelled at Rishi Sunak too.

As the wizard Gandalf says in Lord of the Rings when asked to magic up a fire to warm his companions – “I cannot burn snow”.

Keir Starmer’s director of communications, Matthew Doyle, recently stood down after nine months in No 10,  and, according to the Guardian:

“is understood to have decided to go after feeling he had stabilised No 10’s communications strategy and narrative over the past few months, following the turbulence of the early days in government.”

If you believe that entirely, I have some bridges to sell you.

The man who’s now charged of the strategic helm is James Lyons. It’s a tall order but he’s smart, has a wealth of experience from newspapers, TikTok, and the NHS and had reportedly disagreed with Doyle of late, taking an increasingly leading role, such has been the pressure to grip the narrative properly.

Steph Driver is the other half of the operation, focussed on ‘delivery’ with an equally strong record in comms in Labour circles. The splitting of the role into two may hint at just what a task it has become.

However, there’s plenty of signs they haven’t cracked it yet.

Some of the most recent social media output has been bizarre. They don’t have the problem which dogs the Tories – just getting heard – the BBC rarely bother to invite shadow ministers to comment, as if auntie was now absolved of that ‘painful duty’. So,Labour should have an opportunity for selling their project unopposed.

However Starmer was roundly criticised when he produced a tweet this week for the local elections, listing Labour’s ‘achievements.’

It wasn’t that his claims were ‘arguable’, as political claims can be. It wasn’t that they were overblown. It was a list of boasts to which all the public evidence was the exact opposite. Not questionable, just wrong. Like their ‘£22 billion black hole’ shtick it was stuff only some of the Labour party believes is true.

The clever-clever school of comms think even highlighting such posts amplifies their reach. It may, but to assume that helps spread a positive message to a wider audience naive.

Rachel Reeves trumpeted how much she was “backing business” whilst businesses continue to complain volubly that they feel undermined by her Budget of five months ago.

Posted claims of putting people back into work, whilst simultaneously crippling the ability of business to employ people and pretending a factory worker has welcomed the Prime Minister, when said worker is deputy leader of a Labour council undermine not overwhelm.

Willing Labour backbenches echo platitudes like “fixing the foundations” and “relentlessly focussed on growth” but where once they were battle cries, they feel more like life rafts as the evidence mounts up that they aren’t working.

So why try to say any of that?

Labour need new, more convincing, songs to sing and it seems they don’t have them. That, in itself, is noteworthy. Time for their comms folk to “roll up their sleeves”? Comms needs to repeat messages that have long sell by dates otherwise you get to a point Maddy Grant described in the Telegraph.

“As Keir Starmer reminds us on a weekly basis, there’s a fundamental hilarity to those who don’t understand why people are laughing at them.”

So the Tories have nothing to worry about right?

Yeah, I still have those bridges to sell.

No, it’s hard enough for them to even get into the conversation. They barely have the people to help get them into the conversation. After the crushing defeat and cuts to CCHQ the Tory comms team is tiny. Whilst the Conservative leadership explain their policy programme is under construction their comms team are in much the same position as Labour: what’s the vision, the building blocks, the narrative you want us to sell?

One of Kemi Badenoch’s closest advisers believes that moment will only come after rebuilding trust. Trust that the party is different. There’s plenty who’ll still tell you ‘nobodies listening yet’. Maybe but there’s lessons to learn, now. Labour’s offering them.

In a way rebuilding the parties comms should be the same as the policy forums. Do the strategy and systemic change now in order to be nimble, focussed and fit to go toe-to-toe when it counts.

Kemi Badenoch described on ConHome this week her aims for rebuilding the parliamentary party to find:

“A new cadre of future Conservative MPs who really believe in less tax, less interference, less regulation and a government that does some things well, not lots of things badly. MPs who are going to hold the civil service to account, who are willing to change things, and who are willing to make difficult decisions amid the inevitable chorus of miserable left-wing opprobrium that the other side always uses to try to stop things.”

Selling ‘difficult’ requires the re-insertion of authenticity and honesty into comms which then becomes an edge. Labour’s honesty is as questionable as they laid on the Johnson era. Their hypocrisy creates a target rich environment. Their pre-election ‘country before party’ mantra is vulnerable with their inquiries that aren’t inquiries into the rape gangs scandal. The many chinks in their armour are invitations for palpable hits in sensitive areas where the public care.

It’s not easy selling the truth. ‘We promised you things in the past and we shouldn’t have done. Our opponents are selling unicorns. We’re telling you they are unicorns and we won’t try to sell them. You can’t have everything you want, and anyone who tells you can, is lying.’

The best counter to both our opponents is exposing they’re selling “all the fears and no ideas”

What Conservative spinners don’t need – is to copy anything Labour comms is doing right now.