Conservatives are currently reassuring themselves that a general election defeat is not inevitable because, as Nadine Dorries put it recently, ‘There is no love for Keir Starmer on the doorstep’. This line has been heard many times since the by-election defeats in Wellingborough and Kingswood last week. In the aftermath of those by-elections, the Conservatives pointed to the low voter turnouts and argued that Labour wasn’t adding any more votes to their 2019 totals. Some even said that so modest was Labour’s majority, that had Reform not stood in Kingswood, the Conservative candidate would have retained the seat.

There are even more crumbs of comfort for the Tories to glean from a new survey of 2019 Conservative voters published by Deltapoll yesterday. The poll confirms that just 14 per cent of former Tory voters plan to vote for Starmer at the next election and that Labour still needs to convince more of those who supported Boris Johnson if it is to make victory at the next general election secure. The survey also showed that that 2019 Tory voters are as likely to vote for Reform as they are for Labour.

Just exploiting the deep wells of dislike voters have for the Tories might be enough to see him enter Downing Street

These are clearly issues that should concern Labour: they are specific to Starmer and his ‘brand’ which threaten to spill over into how voters think about Labour as a whole. For whenever Britons are asked what Starmer stands for, amongst the most popular answers are: ‘nothing’, ‘don’t know’, ‘no idea’ and ‘not sure’.

Those on the left will say that is because the Labour leader has been afraid to nail his colours to the mast, most recently abandoning a pledge first made in 2021 to spend £28 billion a year on green investment. But this voter uncertainty – or ‘lack of love’ as Dorries might put it – is hardly unique to Starmer’s Labour: it accompanies the party into office every time it has ended long periods of Conservative rule.

This will come as a surprise to those who bemoan Starmer’s failure to generate the kind of enthusiasm they say Tony Blair created in 1997. That, however, is nostalgia talking. What people who think this often forget is that while New Labour promised ‘change’ it was the most modest kind of change it was possible to imagine. Not only did Blair promise not to raise income tax in his first term, he also committed his government to Conservative spending plans for the first two years of power. Labour might have won big in 1997 but it also won shallow: the polling company NOP discovered that 46 per cent of voters agreed with the statement ‘I’m not enthusiastic about them [Labour] but they can’t be worse than the Tories’.

This palpable lack of love for Blair certainly clashes with pictures of the new prime minister being greeted by an enthusiastic flag-waving crowd in Downing Street just after seeing the Queen. These were however carefully curated images, those gathered being not random members of the public but Labour campaign workers. And while Blair didn’t need its help, some believe the Eurosceptic Referendum party, which stood in every constituency and garnered close to a million votes, directly helped Labour win four seats from the Conservatives.

Going further back to 1964 one might think that Harold Wilson’s promise to create a ‘new Britain’ and unleash the ‘white heat of technological change’ fired up the electorate to end what Labour called ‘thirteen years of Tory failure’. Certainly, this exciting Wilson is often contrasted with boring Starmer – to the latter’s obvious detriment. Such exhilaration however did not seem to be felt by too many Britons as Wilson only added 10,364 more votes to the total gained by his predecessor Hugh Gaitskell when he lost in 1959. The reason why Wilson ended up in Downing Street was because the Liberal vote had doubled to three million. This came mostly at a cost to the Conservatives, who lost seats to Labour.

Perhaps most surprising of all, Clement Attlee’s 1945 Commons majority – Labour’s first ever – was achieved despite 44 per cent of voters surveyed in 1944 preferring a coalition government under Eden or Churchill. Only 26 per cent wanted Labour to rule on its own. The survey organisation Mass Observation even discovered several Liberals who, in anticipation of the widely anticipated Churchill victory, only gave Attlee their support in the belief it would reduce what they feared would be the inevitable Conservative majority.

Conservatives are undoubtedly right that voters do not have much love for Keir Starmer: as the latest Deltapoll approval tracker has it, he is at -2. But – look away now – Rishi Sunak is at -43. In a two-party system such as the one we have, though, many cast their vote not for the party they love but against the party they most dislike. And sometimes they vote for a third party when neither of the bigger two parties appeals to them.

Should Starmer care? For now perhaps not: despite voters’ lack of affection for the Labour leader, just exploiting the deep wells of dislike they have for the Conservatives might be enough to see him enter Downing Street. Whether it will be enough to see him govern successfully and lay the foundations for a long period in office is, however, another matter entirely.