Whatever happened to the British Labour Party? As the Conservatives have fought over their old leader and their new leader, and as the UK has lost a monarch and gained a monarch, the somewhat unassuming Opposition has struggled to make any headlines at all.

Yet towards the end of last month, Labour went into its annual conference significantly ahead of the Tories in the opinion polls for the first time in several years. 

At the opening of that conference, the party’s leader paid tribute to the late Queen as the country’s ‘greatest monarch’, a figure epitomised by her service and devotion to the nation. Labour members then welcomed the country’s new king by singing the national anthem. They sang it, it must be admitted, with an unexpected degree of sombre respect.

This was unusual behaviour – unusually patriotic, unusually royalist, and unusually in tune with the public mood – from a party which, only a few years ago, wouldn’t have contemplated such a brazen bid to court popular appeal, or indeed to acknowledge the validity of such mainstream values, beliefs, and tastes. 

So, is Labour finally moving beyond the previous policy-dithering of its intelligent, likeable, unassuming, and fundamentally uncharismatic leader, Keir Starmer, and away from the long shadow of his controversially left-wing predecessor?

Has Labour finally started to get its act together? Might its grumbling factions start to celebrate the party’s recent successes in by-elections and its relative popularity in opinion polls, rather than seeming almost to resent this restoration of its fortunes?

Can Labour members set aside their fears of sponsoring another unlawful war for long enough to accept that electability does not always eventually lead to messianic megalomania?

Perhaps so, and, if so, it can thank the Conservatives. Because, although they often seemed unable to come together to oppose the idiocy of Boris Johnson’s administration, Johnson’s successor has taken that stupidity to a whole new level of dumb.

As one BBC correspondent put it last month, if the Labour Party is looking rather more united than usual, then the credit should go to Liz Truss for making the divisions between, and therefore the defining goals of, the UK’s two main political parties appear very clear.

In a stark contrast to the Tories’ emphasis on blanket subsidies on the costs of fossil fuels, plans to revive fracking, and refusals to bring in fresh windfall levies on the oil and gas transnationals, Labour has announced proposals to invest billions in green power, and to raise taxes on the rocketing profits of fuel giants. Their leader has even announced bold ambitions to reduce carbon emissions from UK energy production to zero by 2030.

Labour also vowed to reverse the current government’s plan to abolish the top rate of income tax for the richest in the land, a proposal which even that government later found itself forced to ditch. 

At last month’s party conference, the Shadow Chancellor declared Labour the party of financial responsibility and accused the current government of acting like ‘desperate gamblers in a casino’.

She pledged to spend the revenue gained by reinstating the top tax rate to increasing staff numbers in the UK’s National Health Service. She also promised to radically increase spending on medical education, in a bid to ensure that the British healthcare system ‘has the doctors it needs’. These days, with unprecedented hospital waiting lists and emergency waiting times, it clearly doesn’t.

Labour is lucky in having Liz Truss as its primary adversary. Her fiscal policies seem so obviously economically, environmentally, and politically damaging that it would be difficult to fail to concur and cohere to mount an opposing platform.

Diverse figures on the traditionally fractured left have almost inevitably united in condemnation of her foolhardy strategies. Ms. Truss has commented that her left-wing father had always hoped that she might be secretly working as a sleeper agent for socialism. In this sense anyway, it might appear that, at least unconsciously, this is precisely what she is.

In his keynote address to his party conference, Keir Starmer attempted to reposition Labour as the party of the political mainstream. He declared that they would offer the country fresh hope as champions of home ownership, financial prudence, and economic growth, working with business to drive forward a ‘modern industrial strategy’, and seeking to seize the centre ground which has been casually abandoned by Liz Truss’s Conservatives. 

He pledged to enhance public services in the key areas of healthcare, education, and policing. He also announced that his government would establish a massive, state-owned renewable energy corporation to turn the UK into a ‘green superpower’.

He even, rather audaciously, quoted his most controversial predecessor’s enthusiasm for Labour’s rightful destiny as ‘the political wing of the British people’, as he prepared – as The Guardian newspaper’s political editor put it – ‘to take on the mantle of Tony Blair’.

The problem, of course, with invoking the ghost of Mr. Blair is that the legacy of his first administration’s constitutional reforms and investments in public services has long since been overshadowed by his decision to involve Britain in the invasion of Iraq. This parallel really isn’t something which the current Labour leader needs. 

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No, he doesn’t need to pose as Blair 2.0 at all. He’s starting to look much more confident and comfortable in himself, much more of a statesperson born to leadership.

A quiet, modest, and thoughtful man, Mr. Starmer had always found it hard to measure up against the ebullience and bravado of Boris Johnson, a premier so much larger than life in so many ways, and so much lairier, a figure often characterized by colleagues as a bit of a cult. 

By contrast, Keir seems positively adventurous and even rakish when compared to the cloud of dullness incarnate that is Liz Truss, a woman who gives the impression of having undergone emergency personality bypass surgery in a desperate bid to preserve her most basic motor functions.

In a strange way, though, Labour’s immediate political fortunes may end up worse off by virtue of the current government’s unpopularity and its own successes. 

If, as many are predicting, Ms. Truss’s unorthodox experiments with fiscal policy result not only in vast increases in social inequalities but also in uncontrollable inflation, interest rate rises and unserviceable levels of national debt, then the mounting concerns within the more sensible ranks of the Conservative Party appear certain to grow. Indeed, within just few days of her radically tax-cutting mini-budget, one Tory backbencher had told the press that several of his colleagues had already submitted letters of no confidence in her leadership on the grounds that they feared she would ‘crash the economy’.

However, the current likelihood that they would lose their seats at an imminent election makes the chance of a full Tory rebellion against their new Prime Minister’s core strategies seem highly improbable. They aren’t eager to bring down their own government in the hope of saving the country’s economy, as that would almost inevitably result in a general election at a point when His Majesty’s Opposition looks rather more electorally credible than Liz Truss’s Conservative Party.

A diehard Boris Johnson loyalist, the former Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries has so far been a lone Tory voice calling for a general election, on the surprisingly reasonable grounds that Ms. Truss’s policy platform is radically different from the manifesto upon which the Conservatives had been elected under Johnson in 2019. With Ms. Dorries eyeing a seat in the House of Lords, the prospect of an electoral meltdown holds relatively little fear for her. No other senior members of her party have raised their heads so high above the electoral parapet. 

And so, this administration seems set to hobble on, and to carry on hobbling the nation’s economy, until the bitter end – until, that is, an election which must take place, at the very latest, by December 2024. And that is a very long way away for a country in crisis and desperate for change.

At the end of last month, the Labour Party united to give its leader a standing ovation at the end of his speech to their annual conference and in support of his mission to build what he called a ‘fairer, greener, more dynamic nation’. They even gave him a huge round of applause when he spoke of his reforms to their party itself, reforms which just a year ago had caused major upsets within their ranks. 

This is at last a political party determined to show the country that it is fit to govern, with a leader suddenly and strikingly willing to assert the strength of his political vision. After two and a half years of his lacklustre leadership, this is what the Labour faithful have been waiting for. Time and the polls will tell whether the wider electorate have shared their patience.

The early signs certainly look good for Labour. In the immediate of their conference, opinion polls showed a massive surge in their popularity, with their approval ratings reaching 54 per cent, giving them a 33-point lead on the Tories.

Even as Labour’s conference trundled smoothly on, the British economy had entered its worst crisis since the credit crunch, sparked by Liz Truss’s eccentric decision to announce plans for massive borrowing to fund tax cuts, focused particularly on advantaging the wealthiest in society. 

The government had declined an offer from its own experts to provide an economic forecast to accompany their fiscal statement. The value of the pound had plunged to a record low and turmoil had descended upon the financial markets.

This situation prompted a general feeling among the public and across much of the media that, as former Tory Chancellor Ken Clarke commented, ‘the lunatics have truly taken over the asylum’. 

This common perception will no doubt benefit Keir Starmer, but at such a cost to Britain that the Labour leader himself must be wondering whether his own political gain would really be worth all this pain.

As the controversies raged at her own party’s conference earlier this month, and senior figures started to speak out against her leadership, Liz Truss had insisted that she was not going to back down on her plans for tax cuts for the super-rich. Like her idol Margaret Thatcher, she continued to declare she was not a politician prone to U-turns on her core policies.

Yet, within a few hours, her Chancellor announced that the government would, after all, reverse its proposal to abolish the top rate of income tax. This came the day after the nation’s top polling expert, Professor John Curtice, had told a meeting of activists at the Tory conference that the Opposition were ‘very clearly the favorites’ to win the next election – adding that Liz Truss’s fiscal package had ‘resulted in very serious electoral damage to the Conservatives’.

The situation was reminiscent of the way in which, during her leadership campaign, Ms. Truss had swiftly dumped a policy to pay lower salaries to public sector workers based in poorer regions of the country – as soon as everyone had said it was utterly insane.

This Prime Minister presents herself as the tough and unyielding face of hard-line Conservatism. She has said she will not court short-term popularity. Yet she has also repeatedly run scared in the face of poor opinion polls and adverse reactions from her own party and the Tory press. 

In her first weeks in office, Liz Truss proved herself to be both economically incompetent and politically inconsistent. It was an unprecedentedly disastrous start to her administration. 

Mr. Starmer must now convince the British electorate that he is rather more worthy of their trust. If Ms. Truss’s leadership carries on like this, Keir may find this an unexpectedly easy task.