Voices: Tactical voting was Keir Starmer’s secret weapon. Next time, it could be turned against him
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The prime minister won because of anti-Tory tactical voting last year – but, John Rentoul argues, new polling suggests that the next election could be very different. In their more optimistic moments, Keir Starmer’s advisers think that the split on the right will give them at least two terms in government.
The Conservatives are ruined and will need longer than four years to restore their reputation. Their failure to control immigration, in particular, guarantees a long spell in the sin bin. Nigel Farage’s party, on the other hand, cannot go from five seats to winning a majority in one go. Even if it overtakes the Tories, the Tories will continue to have a core vote that will block Farage’s path to power.
That is the optimistic scenario for Labour: that “a scorpion death fight between the Tories and Reform,” as a Downing Street aide put it to The Times on Friday, will allow Starmer to win again with just one-third of the vote or an even lower share.
It would be a mirror image of the 1980s when the opposition to Margaret Thatcher was divided between Labour and the Liberal/SDP Alliance. The Social Democratic Party was, like Reform, a new party, which won a lot of support and at times overtook the two main parties in the opinion polls, and which struggled to break through under the first-past-the-post voting system.
But there is another scenario, the fear of which haunts No 10. It is that Starmer’s opponents unite against Labour – not in an electoral pact between parties, but in an unspoken understanding among voters. The nightmare is that tactical voting, which delivered Starmer’s landslide, could take it away again.
