The 'Lucky General' Myth: How Keir Starmer's Opponents Are Still Underestimating Him

The Labour leader's opponents need to stop fooling themselves that he won a massive landslide victory through sheer luck

The popular view of Keir Starmer among his political opponents is that he has been a “lucky general”, who just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

For those on both the left and right of the Labour leader, this an understandably appealing idea. 

For his critics on the left, it allows them to dismiss his electoral successes as purely being a function of the dire state of the Conservative party, rather than having any relation to his own political choices.

For his critics on the right, it is similarly appealing. After years of dismissing him as a boring, out-of-touch, lefty London lawyer with no hope of ever winning a general election, the idea of him merely being “lucky” in ultimately doing so is an alluring one.

Rather than admit that their own ideas were wrong, or that Starmer and his policies are popular, they instead tell themselves that the Labour leader only won because the Conservative party wasn’t being Conservative enough.

It wasn’t that Labour won the election, they comfort themselves by saying, it was simply that the Conservative party threw it all away.

This isn’t entirely wrong.

Labour’s vote share did only increase by less than two points since 2019, while the Conservative party’s vote share did collapse to a record low.

In purely numerical terms, the election was obviously much more about Conservative failure than it was about Labour success.

Yet the problem with this analysis of the result, is that it underestimates Starmer’s own role in exploiting the Conservative Party’s collapse and the decisions he took which helped it to happen.

And it therefore also underestimates how successful he could be at exploiting what is to come next.

Here’s why, after four long years of failing to take the Labour leader seriously, at their own political cost, his opponents now risk making exactly the same mistake again now he’s in office.