The Labour Party under Keir Starmer: Plotting the route to a shallow landslide

When it felt safe to celebrate in public Labour’s largest landslide victory since 1997, Keir Starmer and his wife drove down to Tate Modern in the early hours of Friday 5th July, where Labour was holding its victory party. Looking relieved and happy, the Labour leader turned to the audience composed largely of party officials, MPs, advisers and a few journalists, and shouted: ‘We did it!’ (BBC News 2024). Starmer’s joy is understandable. In little more than four years, he turned around the electoral fortunes of the Labour Party, winning 411 seats on 33.7% of the vote (Cracknell and Baker 2024: 11). In 2024, Labour recovered from its worst defeat since 1935 and was just eight seats away from replicating New Labour’s landslide of 1997. If in 2019 Labour lost seats everywhere in Britain, in 2024, Labour won seats everywhere, albeit on a shallow vote share. It is worth remembering that in 2019, Labour lost on 32.1% of the vote, electing only 202 MPs. These results suggest that Labour’s electoral strategy was very efficient at winning seats where it needed to and contrasted with the one adopted in 2019 when the party won large majorities in urban areas while becoming less competitive in marginal constituencies (Furlong and Jennings 2024: 75).