Now that this year’s Labour Conference has ended, already it has begun to fill the hearts of Londoners with the same confidence they felt early in the Conference of 2014.  A keen-eyed reader will note, however, that in 2015 Labour went on to lose the election by a 6-point margin. Why is it that the chattering classes are convinced Labour have the chops to win, and what makes them think things are different now to 8 years ago?

After all, Labour is again led by a rather boring man with a nasal quality to his voice.  They are again attempting not to modernise themselves but to reach back into the past, albeit this time to Blair rather than Kinnock. They are again accusing the Tories of fiscal incontinence when it comes to their pet projects, regressive policies, and economic sluggishness.  We are even in a ‘Cost-of-Living Crisis’, just as Ed Miliband announced ad nauseam in the run-up to 2015’s big vote. So what gives?

A lot of it has to do with style. People thought Ed Miliband was, as Jeremy Paxman so eloquently put it, ‘a North-London geek’. They thought Ed Balls was a factional politician who had the budget management skills of a toddler, a not unreasonable claim considering until 2007 he had been working at the top ranks of the Treasury that gave us the financial crisis of 2008.  

By contrast, Sir Keir Starmer is boring, but not nerdy. He doesn’t claim to be a ‘coke addict’ like Rishi Sunak, or love Star Wars like Sajid Javid. His idea of bending lockdown rules may have been a warm beer and a korma with some Labour Party members (a pretty horrifying idea for most of us), but at least it wasn’t Dungeons and Dragons.  

He can also eat sandwiches and hasn’t put his policies on a rock that looks dangerously like a gravestone (look it up). He was even smart enough not to support the mental idea of colouring the Labour rose logo green, an idea with such a lack of artistic or symbolic merit that Miliband would likely have approved it in a heartbeat 7 years ago.

Working in his favour too is that unlike Ed Balls, no-one really thinks about Rachel Reeves at all.

Starmer has also avoided the other failings of Ed Miliband’s promised new dawn – he isn’t up against a coherent government. In 2014, like now, the Conservatives were polling in the low-30s; Labour was pressing toward the 40 per cent mark until Conference Season. But Ed fluffed his speech and forgot to mention the deficit, then still the biggest shiny object the political classes cared about (and roaring back to the fore today), and Cameron pounced.  

In his Conference speech, he accused Labour of unseriousness, a lack of economic good sense, and contempt for ordinary people. Hypocritical you may argue, but backed up with a (vaguely) understandable and coherent record of higher employment, ‘making work pay’ through welfare reform, lower deficits, and growth consistently over 2% by 2013, it was effective. The words ‘long-term economic plan’ were slowly ground into the minds of the TV-news watching public. Although not clear from the polls, Cameron regained ground and went on to win.

The idea that the Tories have had a coherent, ‘long-term economic plan’ in the years since the Cameroons were ejected from government is laughable. Their attitude to the fiscal probity they once seemed to stand for is contempt. Thus, the baton of sensible economic management falls to Labour, as it has done only in the sixties, the nineties and the early aughts. 

It is for Starmer to drop, whereas it was for Ed Miliband to gain.  And the message of ‘I can run the economy far better than this lot’ will resonate far more powerfully than ‘my cuts will be smaller than theirs but that somehow won’t result in more borrowing’ of Miliband’s 2015 campaign. He can set his own mood music, whereas the two Ed’s found themselves tangoing to Cameron’s tune.

So Sir Keir had better hope style and circumstances segue together as seamlessly as they did for his moment of silence last Sunday. If they do, the coming election might look more like 1997 than 2015.