aAs the election campaign entered its final week, staff at Labour HQ had a surprise guest: “Things are going really well,” Tony Blair told them, “I don’t bet, but…” His audience erupted in laughter, with the Conservative gambling scandal still fresh in their minds.
But the former prime minister also wanted to reassure the exhausted but excited crowd of about 100 senior party leaders of the vital role they are playing in pulling Labour back “from the brink of extinction” and putting it within reach of winning power.
“Once you get in, there’ll be so much more you can do. It’ll open up a lot of different possibilities,” he told them.
Labour’s election campaign was a huge success, with the party laser-focused on winning votes. where They were crucial, winning dozens of swing seats rather than rallying support in the safest constituencies and securing what one aide described as a “Star Margi Don.”
“This has been by far the most disciplined and impressive campaign I’ve ever run,” said a veteran of many Labor campaigns. “The campaign we talked about from the start was exactly the campaign we ran.”
They added: “Even in the tough moments we had a really clear purpose. Maintaining that discipline, even if it’s not the sexiest thing in the world, is at the heart of it.”
The approach has been driven by the party’s two campaign managers, Morgan McSweeney and veteran Labour MP Pat McFadden, who spend more than 14 hours a day in what they jokingly call “solitary confinement”.
“They have the ability to think critically about where they are, rather than getting bogged down in the status quo,” one campaign official said. “Pat’s temperament is a perfect fit for that.” Mr. McFadden is described, ironically, by another colleague as “a ray of sunshine.”
After speaking by phone with Starmer, the pair convened the first meeting of the day at 6.30am, with all major decisions taken by 8am. All of them were framed by three key messages: it was time for change, economic stability was the priority, and policy “first steps”.
Labour has been criticised for its cautious approach to the election campaign, but one senior party strategist defended the decision not to jump into every controversy that might pass by.
“We weren’t giving the Conservatives a type of Labour party that they could win against. When you play football at school, everyone chases the ball. We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to choose sides,” they said.
From the start, the Labour campaign was keen to attack the Conservatives: “We wanted to make sure they were on the losing side, and in fairness they aided and abetted us a lot,” says one campaign official.
From the moment he announced his surprise election in pouring rain, Sunak’s campaign has been shadowed by missteps – an accident-prone photo-op, a controversial announcement of compulsory military service, an early return from the Normandy landings and a gambling scandal.
But not everything has gone Labour’s way. Its early days have been overshadowed by controversy over the selection of veteran Labour MP Diane Abbott. Starmer also Angering the UK’s Bangladeshi community when he specifically criticized the community during a debate on immigration.
Labour has been under constant attack from the Conservatives on tax, and in their first televised showdown, Sunak prevailed with a since-discredited attack that Starmer would raise taxes by £2,000 a year. “They wanted the tax issue to remain,” says one adviser, “so they did everything they could to contain it.”
Their tactic to shut down the debate was so successful that a top Treasury official wrote a letter criticising the cost estimates, and when Penny Mordaunt made the same remarks to Angela Rayner in a subsequent debate, the moderator had to shut her down.
But the media did not stay quiet. In subsequent interviews with Starmer or the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, they listed one possible tax increase after another, only to rule out an increase in capital gains tax on your main residence as “completely absurd”.
“We had to make a judgement call about how to deal with it,” the aide said. “Tax is one of the things people are most concerned about about the Labour Party, but we didn’t want to waste time debating pointless proposals one by one.”
Similarly, the campaign dismissed attempts by the Conservatives to portray the 61-year-old Starmer as a “sleepy caretaker” because of his age, echoing Donald Trump’s attacks on 81-year-old Joe Biden.
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“But attacks have to be truthful and this one wasn’t,” the aide added. “Ordinary people don’t look at Keir and say he’s lazy or doesn’t work hard. Ed Miliband’s 2015 poster in Alex Salmond’s pocket was damaging because it promoted the idea of general truth-telling.”
Starmer spent much of the campaign on the streets with a tiny entourage, sticking closely to his principles and making the most of defining moments like the launch of his manifesto – a deliberate decision not to announce any radical new policies in the document to avoid public scepticism and Conservative attacks.
When Starmer did visit, he spent time talking to staff in a modern, open space, rather than in his own tiny office, with his chief of staff Sue Gray’s desk outside.
The day after Mr Sunak’s Normandy senate gaffe, he addressed the audience, telling the public the Prime Minister’s actions symbolised how corrupt he had become. At the end, he turned around and embraced Mr Gray and Ms McSweeney.
“Kids in the playground will have their lives changed by what this man does,” said one emotional staff member from Mr Starmer’s office, which overlooks the Westminster skyline in the distance and a local primary school, as the scale of the victory became clear.
But most of the shadow cabinet were there at one point or another, including Jonathan Ashworth, the central figure who lost his seat in the election night shock, whose press conference antics didn’t quite match the daredevil feats of Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey but did provide some mild entertainment.
One day he shredded the Conservative manifesto in front of reporters – there were huge cheers from around the office when he did it because there were real concerns the shredder wouldn’t work. “It was a stunt and if it had failed he would have looked stupid,” said a staffer.
Hundreds of staff, many of them volunteers, were in the office every day, tucking into Domino’s pizza and lasagne, or lingering for the evening’s TV debates, while the Pret a Manger on the corner was a huge success. When the manifesto was launched in Manchester, hundreds of chocolate ice creams were handed out at HQ, as is Labour tradition.
On busy days, two people would sit at a desk, and the party was held out over the space in the office near Waterloo. Staff manning it were a bit surprised to see that it was themed around Alice in Wonderland, with a giant Alice’s feet adorning one wall and a giant book depicting a reclining white rabbit.
As the days went by, the projected vote margin didn’t narrow. “There was no arrogance. Everyone kept saying, ‘The votes aren’t counting,'” one adviser said. “But we felt we were winning. We knew it.”
The offices emptied out in the final week of the campaign as staff scattered around the country to help canvass and distribute leaflets, but in the early hours of election night, excited but exhausted staff reunited for one last victory rally at the Tate Modern.
“We could either cry or lie down and sleep for a week,” said one attendee, clutching a wine bottle in the spacious Turbine Hall. “I worked my ass off. I can’t believe we made it.”
Back at the headquarters, a dot-matrix countdown clock hanging at the entrance marked the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the election day, eventually reaching zero.
