“WE are awful and out of touch — vote for us.” Why does the “sensible, grown-up” Labour leadership keep pushing this bizarre line?  

Sir Keir Starmer promised a “professional election operation,” but the frequent repeating of the “we are not worth voting for” argument in public looks designed to lose even more votes.

It only makes sense when you realise this message isn’t aimed at winning voters. 

It’s aimed at winning over Labour Party members, by making them despair so much they will love Starmer’s sour medicine.

The latest version of this “we-are-rubbish-don’t-vote-for-us” appeared on the front page of the Observer. 

Deborah Mattinson, the “focus group guru” appointed as Starmer’s new director of strategy, gave a “a stark internal analysis” of Labour’s prospects to MPs. 

But Starmer’s team gave this “internal” analysis straight to the Observer, which duly reported: “Millions of voters who Labour must win back if it is to regain power have little idea what the party stands for or why it would improve their lives.”

This may well be true — but the proper response to this internal analysis would be to show externally what Labour stands for, not to get another headline saying nobody loves Labour.

But that’s not what Labour is doing right now. As Matt Zarb-Cousin asked in the Guardian back in June: “Why does Keir Starmer keep telling voters that Labour deserves to lose?” 

He listed all the lines Labour’s leadership keeps churning out “Labour doesn’t listen to voters”; “Labour has lost the trust of working people”; “Labour are talking to ourselves instead of the country.”

But none of this self-flagellation will attract more voters. Nobody would buy soap powder if the packet said “Unpopular soap powder.”

So why the self-hatred from the top? I think the reason is that Labour’s leadership is still entirely focused on winning control of the Labour Party, rather than fighting the Conservatives.

Starmer won the leadership by promising to keep much of Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing policies, but in a softened form. 

However, he has actually run a much more right-wing “New Labour” leadership, having sacked most left-wing shadow cabinet members and replaced his core team with New Labour retreads.

None of this would matter if Labour was picking up support. Labour’s membership will trade a lot of principle for a little chance of success. But it isn’t. 

Starmer’s beige, insipid leadership, his ineffective managerialism and his avoiding conflict with the government is seeing the party languish in the polls. 

Starmer’s Labour isn’t doing any better than Corbyn’s at its lowest point (2019), and is performing much worse than Corbyn’s high point (2017).

So how to persuade Labour’s members to stick with the plan? By demoralising them so they will accept any poor performance. 

The message is: accept a further move to the right, accept more “patriotism,” more “crime crackdown,” less “tax the rich” — or Labour will lose even more voters. 

Labour’s leadership is so focused on controlling the party, and defining itself against the left, that it is prepared to spread misery until the party accepts Starmer’s rightward turn.  

Starmer could only win the Labour leadership election with his left-sounding “10 pledges.” 

Now he is trying to bounce the party into entirely different policies with this “self-flagellation.”

There is a creepy, nasty subculture, which rose in the 2000s called “pick-up artists” — lots of dodgy blokes sold themselves as experts in seduction who could help unpopular guys get girls. 

One of the key “techniques” is called “negging.” It’s short for “negative feedback” and it means subtly — or not so subtly — undermining the confidence of a woman you are trying to “pick up” with backhanded “compliments” and criticism. 

“Negging” is supposed to lower a woman’s self-esteem as a result, make her feel compelled to seek validation from the “pick-up artist.” 

In this supposed seduction technique, making a woman feel a bit low is meant to make her fall into your arms. 

That’s what Starmer is doing with his endless talk about how Labour is unelectable and out of touch — he’s “negging” the party until members feel such low self-esteem that they love their leader, despite his obvious flaws and uninspiring policies.

Junior partner benefits

Starmer’s determination to act like a junior partner to the government leaves a lot of people scratching their heads. Shouldn’t the opposition oppose more?

But there is a logic to the plan. Starmer wants to demonstrate to the ruling classes that Labour can be a responsible junior partner.  

On the off chance the senior partner — Boris Johnson — goes off the rails, Labour might be allowed a turn. 

Starmer hopes looking “responsible” will neutralise attacks from the media. 

Starmer doesn’t believe he can do the other way of resisting those attacks, which involves inspiring people.

This “junior partner” approach may appeal to Labour-minded careerists too. Because “junior partner” jobs are also available to Labour officials.

Joe Moore worked as political adviser to shadow education secretary Kate Green, and before that for Angela Rayner. 

Now he’s off to join lobbying and polling firm Hanbury Strategy. This is a Tory-led firm, founded by former David Cameron strategy director Ameet Gill and former Vote Leave director Paul Stephenson. 

Hanbury did £700,000 worth of work for the Tories in the 2019 election. After the election, the Tory government gave Hanbury a £580,000 no-bid contract to help with Covid-19 communications. 

Incredibly, Hanbury’s government contract included doing polling on Labour figures like Starmer. 

Rayner denounced Hanbury’s Covid-19 contract as a “racket.” But her former aide, Joe Moore, is joining Hanbury. 

When not working for the Tory Party or a Tory government, Hanbury represents firms like Citibank, or UK Finance, the lobby group for British banks.

In another recent move, Sophia Morrell, who since 2016 has been adviser to Labour’s shadow economic secretary Jonathan Reynolds, has become in-house head of Public Affairs for UK Finance. 

This bankers’ lobby group regularly presses for lower taxes and more power for the City of London. 

In fairness to Morrell, she had a long career in City lobbying before working for Reynolds, so she is really returning to a world from which she came.  

Both Moore and Morrell’s move shows lots of people around the Labour Party are fully plugged into careers that involve working with, rather than against, banks and Tory lobbyists.