If the battle for Britain becomes Starmer v Farage, then how should Labour fight it?

A couple of months after the 2024 general election, I asked Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s chief strategist, whether he thought the Conservatives or Reform would be his party’s primary opponent at the next national contest. He gave what I thought was a candid and reasonable response, because it was the one I would have given myself at the time. He replied that he wasn’t yet sure of the answer.

Now he is. At Sir Keir Starmer’s recent encounter with morose Labour MPs, an occasion so crowded that it required a spillover room with a video link to accommodate all the attendees, the prime minister told them that “the Conservatives are not our principal opponent. Reform are our main rivals for power.”

The first thing to interrogate about this assertion is whether it is true. In terms of parliament, it isn’t. Reform has just a handful of MPs, a contingent that could fit in a small minibus. Even in their hollowed out state, the Conservatives have more than 100. Kemi Badenoch gets the automatic right to be first to respond to every prime ministerial statement and to put six questions to him every week when the Commons is sitting. Nigel Farage gets to intervene only if he catches the speaker’s eye. He wasn’t even present for the statement on the biggest reset with the EU since the Brexit referendum because the Reform leader had bunked off for a holiday in Clacton-on-Sea … no, sorry, make that the south of France.

The case for saying that Reform is shouldering aside the Tories to become the main opposition is based on opinion polls and its advances in the May Day elections. The latest poll of polls has Reform ahead on 30 points, more than double its vote share last July. Labour has wilted to a miserable 22. The Tories, the outfit that used to boast of being the world’s most successful party, have shrivelled to a dire third, at 17. One poll published in the past few days has the Conservatives slithering down into fourth place, behind the perky Lib Dems.

Sceptical old hands can tell you about the early 1980s when the SDP appeared poised to “break the mould of British politics”. Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams won spectacular byelection victories. At its peak, the SDP/Liberal Alliance hit more than 50 points in the polls. It shot up like a rocket – and then came down like a stick. The challenge fizzled out and the blue-red duopoly reasserted itself.

Others find it entirely plausible that an unloved government and an unforgiven Tory party have created a perfect storm for Reform to exploit. Witness a new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research, a left-leaning thinktank. This puts Labour’s troubles in the context of a global trend in which rightwing populists now claim a larger share of the vote in western democracies than do parties of the centre-left. David Miliband, who sat in cabinet during the New Labour years, warns his party of the peril of being seen as “defending the status quo even as voters say it is failing”.

When the next election doesn’t have to happen before 2029, it is reckless to draw firm conclusions, but this is not deterring ministers from rushing to judgement. One of the cabinet’s most influential members tells me: “The next election will be very different to the last one. The politics we’ve seen elsewhere in Europe – Le Pen in France, the AfD in Germany – is coming to the UK. We now face a different kind of enemy on the right.” Another member of the cabinet recently offered me the gloomy prediction that Reform would garner at least a quarter of the vote when Britons next choose whom to put into No 10. Sir Keir is not only building up Mr Farage by portraying him as the primary challenger: the Labour leader is also beating down on the Tories. “A once great party is sliding into brain-dead oblivion,” he recently ridiculed them. “They are a dead party walking.” This is almost as scornful about the Conservatives as some Tories are about themselves.