In politics, communication is the core of any leadership. In a world which hinges on what people think of you, it is simply not enough to set policies and then hide in the shadows. The ability to speak with authority, to instil trust and to hold a nation steady through turbulence is what separates those who endure in politics from those who fall. Lose the ability to communicate, and you lose trust. And once trust slips away, it rarely comes back.
This week, Keir Starmer discovered just how quickly that spiral can begin.
The miscalculations
Angela Rayner’s departure last weekend should have been a controlled firebreak: a ministerial resignation handled on Starmer’s terms. Instead, it became a case study in premature judgment. Despite Rayner herself admitting that she was seeking extra advice on her tax affairs, the Prime Minister continued to back her publicly, only to be left exposed when those checks revealed a breach of the ministerial code.
Yet if Rayner was a stumble, Mandelson has been an ankle-breaker. Yet again, like Rayner the week before, Starmer went out defending Mandelson during PMQs. And yet again, by Thursday, the full facts (of his friendship with the convicted criminal, Jeffrey Epstein) were exposed and Mandelson was gone.
Backing colleagues is one thing, but backing them without certainty or the facts is quite another. Both these cases show a clear trend that in a bid to answer critics quickly, facts are pushed aside. And for a leader who promises seriousness and forensic detail, both reveal a needless and reckless gamble.
The Mandelson problem
But things have really started to get mucky this weekend. Mandelson’s claim that he had supplied the emails in question to Starmer’s office the day before he went to the despatch box at PMQs, raises a worryingly corrosive question: was Starmer aware but unable to change his given lines, or was there a categorical failure of communications – a Prime Minister left unbriefed by his team at the most critical political moment of the week?
Either way, the leader is now caught in the crossfire as a direct result of party comms. And the narrative of integrity and honesty, that the Party hinged itself on at the election, shredded in an instant.
A pattern of weak communications
What makes this week more damaging is that it follows months of shaky communications across the party. Each episode on its own might be manageable, but together, they paint a picture of a party that cannot land its message, and a media strategy that’s at risk of looking amateurish rather than one in authority.
There also appears to be something deeper at play when it comes to the Labour Party’s press game: either a lack of speed in getting on top of the story, a lack of expertise in understanding wider societal and psychological contexts (as former hack David Yelland said on LBC, “no one’s got their listening ears on”), or a lack of communication between departments (as the Mandel-Scandal has shown). Any one of those three would cause problems, but combined, is chaos.
Add in the internal cracks (Labour backbencher Clive Lewis MP stated yesterday that he does not believe Starmer “is up to the job,”) and we have a fire on our hands. After all, reputations aren’t built purely by the public. They’re built first and foremost by your own team. Lose their confidence, and you lose control – as Sir Alex Ferguson once put it, “lose the dressing room, lose the match.”
Law versus communications
Look, I know many lawyers. Brilliant, fantastically educated, clever individuals. But would any of them claim to understand or have an expertise in media or communications? Absolutely not. The law and communications demand different skills. One prizes rational, logical thinking and precise detail, the other requires intuition, psychology, and “narrative craft”… (I’ve had many a debate with lawyers working on cases that I’m handling). And like world-class footballers who have turned their hand to managing, Starmer has excelled in one world but now finds himself tested in another. The contrast is stark, and it is beginning to show.
And the truth is, politics not only requires you to have an understanding of how to sell a story, it also requires the best communications team in the world behind you. Without that, even the strongest policy or the sharpest intellect will falter. It is a gap which exposes leaders time and again – you have to take the public with you and to do that, you have to talk to them.
And here lies the deeper problem with the current Labour strategy.
To be an effective communicator, you need to have a story. We know their starting point: the “we inherited a black hole…” line has been thrown out over and over again. But what comes next? There is seemingly no middle, no hero, and no incentive for the readers – the electorate – to want to read the rest of the book. This doesn’t feel like a novel hurtling through a fantasy storyline (like the party before), but rather a book where the author got bored and gave up writing after Chapter 4.
And without that full story, the full direction and end goal, the comms machine has nothing to deliver, and the public has nothing to believe in.
If we can see the destination, and understand the costs and delays of getting there, we can often forgive the scenic journey.
And what binds this week’s missteps together is not the detail of tax affairs, old emails or reshuffles, but the vacuum of a narrative and the loss of control. In each case, the communications failure was not secondary – it has, itself, become the scandal.
The cost of losing control
For now, Starmer remains, but with the weekend papers full of questions, and King of the North, Andy Burnham, flung into the ring of possible successors, his momentum is fragile. A single bad week can mark the beginning of a longer decline if it signals weakness rather than resilience, and this is, unfortunately, where he currently resides.
His allies will insist this is merely turbulence, not crisis. Yet the pattern is worrying: communications handled reactively, decisions and statements made without rigour, and ill-formed narratives slipping away handed over to competitors to own. These are precisely the moments when reputations crack, not because of the scandal itself but because of a team’s inability to get on the front foot.
Reputations, especially politically where loyalties run deep, rarely collapse in one blow. They crumble through small fractures of trust that widen when leaders stop telling the story themselves, where headlines on what you’re doing wrong start to dominate over the more important – but duller – proof points of success.
If Starmer is to succeed, he needs to get back in front. Take charge and show authority. Without this, I fear Chapter 5 will be ghostwritten by others as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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