After Keir Starmer unveiled his '5 Missions' last week, Wes Ball and Alan Wager consider the transition from opposition to government, the dangers of 'unforeseen policy gaps', and how to translate 'campaigning poetry' into 'Whitehall prose'.
The job of being Leader of the Opposition is, famously, the most thankless available in British politics. Yet Keir Starmer's 'mission statement' last week managed something that nearly all speeches from those in his job - including most of his own - fail to achieve: broadly favourable and widespread coverage of his core message that Labour is a government-in-waiting.
Looking beneath those headlines, and instead at the admirably brief document accompanying these 'missions', there was something else going on. It was evidence of progress in one of the core tasks that Starmer's team face - the most frequently forgotten, and relentlessly unglamorous, part of the Opposition's job. Forgotten, because it happens in private and among a close coterie of advisors. Unglamorous, because it is not a job that the leader himself ever wants to be seen anywhere near. There was evidence in the mission statement that Starmer had begun preparing for the task of transitioning to the job of Prime Minister.
One of the key tenets of the UK's constitution is that His Majesty's Loyal Opposition is ready, hangovers in tow, to enter Downing Street the day after the general election - or very soon afterwards, if they need other parties to make up the numbers. Never mind the next decade, Starmer will need to enter Number 10 complete with a plan for what to do in the first 24 hours, the first King's Speech and, even, that dreaded Americanism, 'the first 100 days in office'.
Politics and psychology can get in the way of these preparations. There is the fear of the leader being seen to be 'measuring up the curtains', of course. Preparing for government is an exercise in extended delayed gratification - missions now, but wait two years until they make first contact with the organs of government. Yet it sounds like Starmer has somehow managed to think about these issues without a political breakdown. His proposals for a seat of national missions are as much a way of doing government as they are a series of pledges.
In a recent paper for the IPPR, we drew on lessons from the past on how to manage this final period in preparing for transition. One of the key lessons is this temptation to delegate can mean chains of authority and decision-making break down. In 2015, this was mitigated by the widely respected figure of (Lord) Charlie Falconer leading the work on transition. Starmer could do worse than appointing a Falconer-type figure to work on machinery of government if he reshuffles his team again, but whoever is in charge needs to have political authority, gravitas, and respect across all wings of the party.
Campaigning poetry does not always work well when translated to Whitehall prose. Oppositions are good at making narrow, funded commitments but are less good at thinking through how to deliver a manifesto in its entirety. It was in the summer of 2014, a year out from the election, that Miliband's team began a granular audit of every commitment, its delivery mechanism and the dependencies to achieve that outcome. As an example of the reality check these preparations generated, it became clear that Labour's pledge a year earlier to build 200,000 new homes required serious investment in vocational training - there simply weren't enough plumbers and electricians to build them. Fast forward to 2024 and Starmer will have to work out, for example, the building capacity and workforce issues around any pledge of universal childcare across England. The more ambitious the programme of government, the greater the possibility of these unforeseen policy gaps.
Starmer seems to have found a way through this with his national missions. His commitment to 'delivery focused cross-cutting mission boards' looks like an attempt to break down the departmental walls in Whitehall and force co-operation. This is, of course, easy to say and difficult to achieve: Starmer will have to turn around the ship of state with its inherent silos and cabinet committee structures to make any of this work in practice. One way he could entrench this structure could be to organise access talks with the Civil Service on the basis of these missions rather than department to department.
This sort of preparation - audits of departments, ordering priorities, and mapping out what you will deliver and when - is work that, for Labour oppositions over the last decade, has never seen the light of day. The facts are striking. Only two of the last ten leaders of the opposition have made the transition from opposition to government. Since 1945, only two Labour leaders have done so.
It is no surprise that Keir Starmer's name is often mentioned in the same breath as the two that did make that transition - Harold Wilson and Tony Blair. His principal public task over the next twelve months will be ensuring he gets over the line and into Number 10. Yet what was clear in his mission speech is that Starmer's team have begun to seriously think not just how to get in to Downing Street, but how he might stay there.
Wes Ball is senior vice president at Edelman Global Advisory. Between 2012 and 2016, he was director of the Parliamentary Labour Party and was part of the team preparing Ed Miliband for the transition to government.
Dr Alan Wager is a political scientist based at Queen Mary, University of London and the Mile End Institute.