The general election is on October 24 next year; Labor will win; and Keir Starmer’s honeymoon will be short. This week’s Peter Mandelson Memorial Dim Sum Supper (more on this later) didn’t yield any shocking predictions about the year ahead – although it was a notable turnaround from last year’s predictions.
Twelve months ago, a majority of those present predicted that Rishi Sunak would win the next general election. This year we saw the return of the ritual self-flagellation, where we sit around the table and hit ourselves with napkins, that has marred so many of these gatherings in the past.
This annual exercise in futurology began on December 23, 1998, when I was dining with a group of friends at a Chinese restaurant in Soho and the news reached us by pager that Mandelson had resigned as Trade Secretary. Coincidentally, the same group of friends were having lunch on January 24, 2001 when Mandelson resigned again, this time as Northern Ireland Secretary.
Since then we have gathered just before or after the new year in honor of Lord Mandelson – I should make it clear that he is in no way involved – to make predictions. Enough entertainment for us and for the readers of The independentyou might have thought, but it turned out that David Cameron, when he was Prime Minister, followed our work closely.
“I read your column, the dinner, the dim sum,” he told me. “We need to win a lot of seats from the Lib Dems,” he said. This was early 2015. I should have called an emergency meeting of the supper club at that time to revise our prediction that Ed Miliband would become Prime Minister in a hung parliament.
However, as important as it is to learn from our past mistakes, it is not good to dwell on them, so let’s get on with our business. We thought the election will probably be on October 24, 2024, the last Thursday before the clock goes back. There was one vote for October 10th, but we ignored the heckler in the corner. Both options would mean canceling party conferences. There was a long debate about whether Sunak would run before early December or even January 2025.
I still think December is very likely, but we had to move on to the more important question: who will win. Last year there was a wide variety of views; this time our predictions were clustered in the “small Labor majority” zone, of between 10 and 30 seats (my prediction was 20). I found it remarkable that there were no supporters of the Tory meltdown scenario, and that the consensus was that the poll gap would narrow as voters focused on the choice.
A number of minor predictions were quickly discarded. Jeremy Corbyn would not stand as an independent candidate in the London mayoral elections in May 2024; Sadiq Khan would win; neither Boris Johnson nor David Miliband would stand as candidates in the general election; Reform UK would put ‘The Brexit Party’ in its official name on the ballot papers and stand in most constituencies.
Other predictions took longer. The majority believed that Corbyn would be independent in Islington North, but that he would not win. The minority (myself included) thought he would rather withdraw than risk losing. The question of who would become Chancellor of the Exchequer at the election also divided the company: most thought it would be Claire Coutinho, currently Energy Secretary and a favorite of Sunak, but everyone agreed that Jeremy Hunt would resign at the election and that Sunak I couldn’t contest the election with a chancellor on his way out.
After the election we thought Kemi Badenoch would be the leader of the opposition and in the US elections on November 5, 2024 we were divided between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Lots of conventional wisdom so far.
The most challenging part of our discussion, however, was trying to predict what would happen with a Labor government. Predictions were made about the high positions of Douglas Alexander and Shabana Mahmood. Alexander, who was International Development Secretary in the last Labor government and lost his seat in 2015, is expected to return as MP for East Lothian. Given that he is one of the few people available to Starmer with Cabinet experience (along with Yvette Cooper and Ed Miliband), and given the need for Scottish representation in a Labor Cabinet, he could be Foreign Secretary.
The big question, both before and after the election, is what happens to Ed Miliband, guardian of the narrow strip of bright green water that lies between the Labor and Conservative parties. The opinion of the dim sum supper was that he would survive, but his ideas would not. The £28 billion a year in additional borrowing for green investments has already been delayed and limited by the budget rules of Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor whose translation to 11 Downing Street was taken for granted.
None of that will be left within months of a Labor government that will quickly be engulfed in a public spending crisis, even after the incoming Chancellor stealth increases taxes in her first budget.
So it was interesting to see Patrick Maguire, the leading chronicler of Starmerism and co-author of a forthcoming book on its transition to government, make a statement that resembled an agreed statement by Starmer and Miliband in his book Time column on Friday.
It seemed that Miliband, troubled by the apparent contempt in Starmer’s speech on Tuesday (“we had lost our way, not just under Jeremy Corbyn, but for a while”), had demanded guarantees. Maguire wrote: “Starmer doesn’t see his predecessor, just one, as part of the problem. Instead, as disturbing as this will be for some of his contemporaries to read, milibandism has become a big part of the solution the Labor Party will deliver to voters next year.”
However, when we investigate what this milibandism consists of, it spreads like smoke. Apparently we will hear more about plans for “cheaper power” and “new opportunities for workers” during the election campaign. “For Miliband, this is not hippie-dippy environmental evangelism, but an economic policy and industrial strategy that is also environmentally friendly,” Maguire said.
That sounds like a headlong retreat and a strong statement of support for Sunak-Coutinho’s view that green is good as long as it doesn’t cost people anything. Indeed, it was a surprisingly early vindication, just 24 hours after the dim sum supper, of the prediction of the end of milibandism.
The view of the assembled company was that the grand ideas of a green technology revolution would disappear within months of a Labor government, which will struggle to meet expectations that it cannot be worse than before. We discussed the idea, popular in some quarters, that things can only get better under Labor because the economic and fiscal situation the country will inherit will be so bad. There were no takers.
The good news for Keir Starmer is that we predicted he would win. That is also the bad news for him: that he will win in such difficult circumstances that it can feel like losing.