Apella Advisors party conference briefing
22 September 2023 (London)
At Apella, we like to do public affairs a little differently, so we thought we’d save you some time and give you the post-conference analysis before the conferences actually happen. Not because we’re time-travellers or soothsayers able to see the future, but because if you look hard enough, you can see the stories before they happen.
And because over many, many years of going to conferences, we know the scripts these events follow, and how those scripts get written. Once you know those scripts, you can get through the gossip and the soap-opera and the post-match analysis much more quickly and get to the stuff that really matters.
That’s why this note sets out the questions we think corporate and public affairs types travelling to the conferences should be equipped with in order to return to the office armed with the right insights to drive commercial success.
By taking this approach we aim to help organisations like yours to get ahead of issues in the short term, in order to help strengthen corporate strategies in the long term.
The Apella party conference bullets
The political
Labour will deliver a highly disciplined conference, but it won’t offer real clarity about Keir Starmer’s instincts and the agenda of any government he leads. Key question: What are the areas where he offers certainty, and what’s still up for grabs?
Rishi Sunak will step up the Conservatives’ personal targeting of Starmer, but other Tories will be starting their post-defeat leadership campaigns. Key question: How much will the next generation of Tories embrace an anti-business agenda, and how much will that influence Labour?
The commercial
How exposed is your company to the big policy dividing lines in the run up to the election?
Where does your business need clarity and where can you tolerate ambiguity?
Which politicians, organisations and third parties do you need making your arguments and have you used political party conference to strengthen their understanding of your business and its perspectives?
What are your competitors talking about at conference and how is this being received?
Part 1: Labour
What clarity has Keir Starmer given about his political instincts and what a Labour-led government would be like?
Staying on message
Discipline. That’s the word that will appear most frequently in the post-conference analysis pieces. Commentators will be struck by how faithfully Labour sticks to the Starmer script of responsible, sensible government that doesn’t scare the horses. That discipline was notable enough in Liverpool last year, and Starmer’s position has only strengthened since then as Labour’s poll number has grown.
The recent Labour reshuffle set the tone for conference. The party largely accepted, without demur, the promotion of Blairites and centrists. That’s not because everyone in the Labour movement is entirely happy, but because they’re persuaded that public infighting at this point of the electoral cycle would be self-harming. So internal tensions (which definitely still exist) will be kept very quiet.
Tony or Gordon?
Don’t be surprised if you read more references to Roy Jenkins’ description of the pre-1997 Tony Blair as a man carrying a Ming vase across a polished marble floor. Job 1 for Labour from now until the election is not to drop it by making expensive or complicated commitments that can become the basis for a sustained Conservative attack from now until the election.
So Labour will run a Blair-style campaign, but don’t take that as proof he’d lead a Blairite government. Yes, he’s promoted Pat McFadden and Liz Kendall. But Ed Miliband hasn’t moved, and Gordon Brown remains a force in the land and a voice in Starmer’s ear.
The tension between Labour’s pragmatist and idealist factions is now central to British politics. Thanks to Rishi Sunak’s Net Zero shift, that tension is currently embodied in policy over home heating. Will Labour do what CCHQ wants by going into the election committed to starting compulsory switching to heat pumps from 2026? (You can imagine the poster: “Labour’s boiler bombshell: you’d pay £15,000 for a heat pump under Labour”.) Or will Labour play safe and fudge the issue to blunt the Tory attack? That call on boilers will tell us a lot about who currently has most sway on Starmer.
When it comes to Labour organisation, Starmer’s leadership has seen the departure of many Corbynites – Momentum is a shadow of its former self. But the Soft Left hasn’t gone away. In Angela Rayner it may yet have a champion. The shadow deputy prime minister (a title she fought for, and won) may style herself as Starmer’s John Prescott, but there’s a greater chance she’ll emerge as his Gordon Brown, arousing passions among Labour members who just can’t get excited by their buttoned-down leader.
A weak PM?
A great deal of British politics and policy in the next few years will turn on who Keir Starmer really is, what he wants and what he wants Britain to be. The conference season will end with all of us none the wiser on that score, though not for want of trying by either outside observers or the Starmer team. If anything, it might fuel the suspicion that Starmer himself doesn’t quite know the answers to these questions either.
Some of that is because Starmer knows his own future position is highly uncertain. Barring a truly historic collapse in the Tory vote, any incoming Labour government would have a modest and (possibly even negative) Commons majority. Prime Minister Starmer would also lack much in the way of personal mandate, momentum or – whisper it – charisma to power his own agenda. So the decisions he’d take in office might be significantly out of his hands and depend a lot on the relative power of Labour backbenchers. Labour PPCs will be key targets for public affairs analysis: if there’s a Labour government next year, more than 100 of the MPs that provide its majority will be newly elected ones.
The Lib Dems only add to the uncertainty. Sunak’s green retreat has cheered them in southern seats. What would Labour be prepared to give to secure Lib Dem votes in a finely-balanced Parliament? Promises to review the electoral system are actually quite cheap to make. A more immediate issue would be planning and infrastructure: the Lib Dems have quietly become something of a NIMBY party, contrasting with Labour’s slightly bolder stance on building. Bluntly, no one knows quite how these things would interact in that hung Parliament, adding yet more ambiguity to Starmer’s outlook.
Most personal speech ever (again)
The other reason we’ll leave Liverpool still unclear about Starmer’s agenda is Starmer himself. He’s had more than three years of being Labour leader and he hasn’t clearly defined himself in the role yet. More importantly, he’s had more than 60 years of being Keir Starmer and he hasn’t truly defined that role either. No party conference, no matter how disciplined it is and no matter how sharp the Labour media messaging is, is likely to do the job.
Because no matter how good his speech is, no matter how much personal revelation and impassioned rhetoric his team sews into his text, it won’t change who and what he is, and it certainly won’t shift voters’ (lack of) opinions about him. Almost no conference speech matters enough to justify the volume of media commentary it receives and this year’s speech by Starmer – a cautious man running a cautious campaign – will not buck that trend.
If the leader’s agenda remains opaque and his speech isn’t revelatory, what should public affairs professionals be looking for at the Labour conference? Here’s an obvious answer: clarity – and its absence.
Learn to live with ambiguity
While Starmer’s Labour is ambiguous about quite a few things, it is also capable of clarity. Hence a clear promise, for instance, not to impose a wealth tax. Likewise ruling out rejoining the Single Market. (Even though his message discipline around EU issues has faltered a little recently, he’s still quite clear on the big question of rejoining.)
When a party that is capable of such clarity doesn’t offer it on other issues, it’s reasonable to ask why not.
Public affairs professionals at Labour conference should therefore be asking frontbenchers – publicly and privately – for certainty about their policies. And when that certainty isn’t forthcoming, they should accept that the adverse policy choices they worry about remain real possibilities – and plan accordingly.
How best to make those plans is a story for another day, but as a spoiler: it’s complicated.
The range of forces that will shape and influence the policies of any future Labour government is large and beset with multiple uncertainties. Anyone who tells you with absolute confidence they know how Starmer and Labour will answer the various outstanding questions about their agenda is either deluded or trying to sell you something, or both. Instead of trying to buy simple answers to complicated questions, equip yourself with the tools that help you understand the range of possible answers to those questions and how they arise. Do get in touch if you’d like to hear more about that.
Part 2: The Conservatives
What will the Conservatives look like after the election, and how might that influence Labour’s choices?
Sowing doubts about Keir Starmer
The Conservatives have already begun their conference and their election operation, which are both dedicated to raising questions about Keir Starmer, his plans and his instincts. The aim: make voters uncertain and, if possible, a little scared about the prospect of a Labour government. This isn’t about winning support for the Tories. It’s about sowing doubts about Labour.
Putting the emphasis on their opponents makes sense for Conservatives. A party that’s been in office for 13 years and overseen falling real wages doesn’t really want to run on its record.
Some of this will be personal. Conservatives feel Keir Starmer has failed to define himself clearly in the minds of voters, meaning they have a chance to define him. Their preferred story of Starmer is of a London lawyer inclined to woke social causes and environmental policies that unnerve and repel the 2019 CON voters who are the key to Tory election strategy. The Tory message to them: “He says he’s moderate and boring and he won’t put your taxes up – but he backed Jeremy Cobyn and Remain, his Labour mates want to tax your diesel car and he let Jimmy Savile walk free: can you really trust Keir Starmer with your country?”
Davos Man is getting pumped up?
There’ll be a lot of personal spin around Rishi Sunak too. Despite a couple of good days in the papers, the PM is still the subject of whispering among colleagues who think he’s too sensible and managerial and squeamish to fight Labour in the trenches. So expect a “passionate” speech from a “pumped up” PM and a lot of briefing about how, despite looking like Davos Man, he’s actually a very traditional Right-wing Tory who hates socialism and wokery and so on.
Here, it’s worth noting that the Conservative core-vote/culture-war strategy makes a certain narrow sense: the party is defending a sizeable majority, so hanging on to its voters from the last election would likely be enough to retain power. It might not play well with One Nation Tories and media commentators who (sometimes unconsciously) lean towards liberal social values, but it’s not totally irrational.
From a public affairs perspective, a key issue is how far Labour feels it must go to meet and blunt the attacks that emerge from this Tory approach. Labour had already backed away from its £28bn green investment programme to pre-empt Tory attacks on Labour profligacy, and that was before Uxbridge and the ULEZ issue that raised Conservative hopes and informed the Sunak Net Zero shift. That Labour response over boiler switchover has become a key test of Starmer’s tactics: does he quietly accommodate the Tory agenda, or loudly oppose it?
Wedge issues
Do not be surprised if the Conservative conference features more headline-grabbing promises on wedge issues where Tories believe Starmer will not dare to match them. Some of these issues are predictable: asylum seekers and the ECHR, and some tough talk on Brexit. Labour’s recent signals on an EU deal to return failed claimants and renegotiating the Brexit deal are sure to feature.
It wouldn’t be a huge surprise if the list of challenges to Labour includes some big promises of post-election tax reform. Cutting or even abolishing inheritance tax seems a natural place for Sunak to go next. The tactic, of course, is to give Labour a political Hobson’s choice: oppose an expensive tax cut that would be very popular among many of their target voters, or support it and risk unravelling the message of fiscal discipline that’s taken so long to build up. (If the IHT challenge doesn’t come at conference, it will definitely happen before the next election.)
So the first takeaway from the Conservative conference: the party’s aggressive focus on Starmer, which will matter to the extent that it forces Labour to modify its policies.
For public affairs professionals, therefore, the most interesting thing to watch at Conservative Party conference may well be Labour Party responses to Tory announcements. Analyse those press-released reactions carefully, since they may hold clues about the areas where Labour is prepared to shift in response to Tory attack.
There is something rather Alice-through-the-looking-glass about all this, since it boils down to a party of government acting almost as a lobbyist shifting the positions of the opposition party that may soon replace it.
The future of Conservatism (again)
And this will be the second story of the Conservative Party: the extent to which some Conservatives have given up on the next election and are thinking about life outside government. This isn’t really news. It was almost a year ago that we first heard a Cabinet minister privately say the next election was lost. These days it’s not uncommon to hear Tory MPs discussing their employment plans outside Parliament after next year.
Some of this will manifest itself in low attendance by MPs. It’s an open secret that many Tory MPs prefer to avoid conference, or keep their attendance to a bare minimum: for them, it’s an expensive and sometimes pointless use of time. So actual Tory MPs might be a relatively rare sight in Manchester.
Fatalism about electoral defeat will lead others to continue their preparations for the leadership election that would surely follow.
Here it’s vital to remember: the Conservative membership didn’t pick Rishi Sunak as leader. The membership chose Liz Truss and the membership hasn’t changed much since last summer. They’re unlikely to forgive a general election defeat, and likely to want a new leader who offers “proper” Conservatism, whatever that means.
Sunak will go into the party conference enjoying largely positive newspaper coverage: most Tory-leaning papers liked his Net Zero move. But that positive coverage shouldn’t distract public affairs professionals from the reality of a governing party that’s 20 points behind in the polls and a PM whose support from colleagues is limited at best. “He looks quite lonely in Cabinet”, one minister told us this week.
So expect headlines about Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman, whose every utterance could make news. Others who could make the weather include Lord (David) Frost and Miriam Cotes and Danny Kruger of the New Conservatives group. Behind the headlines about fresh attacks on Labour, the eternal debate about the future of Conservatism will be a central theme of the Tory conference.
F*rget about business
While the various players in the future of Conservatism tend to have a lot to say about social and cultural issues, the interesting question for public affairs professionals to ask at the Tory conference: what do the next generation of Conservatives think about business?
The last few years (Brexit and “f*** business”) have shown that Conservative affection for business cannot be taken for granted; the Net Zero shift underlines Conservative willingness to do things that upset some big companies. Nigel Farage isn’t a Tory, but he (and the Reform UK party he may still return to) can still set the Tory agenda. His fight with NatWest over his bank account is unlikely to be his last act in this arena, meaning some Tories will be keen to stay ahead of him.
So look closely for ministers and MPs talking about “woke capitalism” and “virtue-signalling corporations”, possibly followed by exhortations to “get back to the job of making money.” The degree to which the Conservative Party embraces a business-bashing agenda in the years ahead will help shape the whole public affairs landscape, regardless of who is in power after the election.
That’s not just our analysis. Labour people are thinking about this too.
A Conservative Party that slides out of office and into a Right-wing comfort zone would allow an incoming Labour government a great deal of political room for manoeuvre.
One veteran of the last Labour government recently told us his biggest political concern is now the collapse of the Tory moderates as a force in the party. His analysis was that a Starmer government facing a true-blue Conservative Opposition that abandons the centre-ground will give Labour – and the Labour Left especially – a great deal of licence to operate. “If we get a populist Tory opposition that wants to attack business as woke, the Labour Left will think the road is clear to tax and regulate – and Starmer won’t be under much pressure to resist them.”
Contact:
James Kirkup - jk@apellaadvisors.com
Liz Lynch - ll@apellaadvisors.com
www.apellaadvisors.com