As the famous – if perhaps cliched – quote from former New York Governor Mario Cuomo goes; ‘you campaign in poetry and govern in prose’.
Some of the most successful political campaigns in recent decades have embodied this idea. We need to think only of Blair’s ‘things can only get better’ or Obama’s ‘yes we can’ to understand how powerful such a movement can be.
The general election campaign of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, though, appears to be an outlier, markedly lacking any of this romanticism.
Responding to this characterisation, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Pat McFadden proposed that, just maybe, the country has “had enough of the enthusiasts”, a riposte to Michael Gove’s dismissal of worries from economic experts about the impact of leaving the EU during the Brexit campaign that “the country had had enough of experts”.
Perhaps the way to govern effectively and combat the tide of populism, is to take the ‘poetry’ out of politics all together. Romantic narratives, it’s suggested, are the domain of nefarious actors from the political extremes. The adults are back in the room, and so the children’s fairytales are no longer needed.
Starmer’s movement is to be communicated not through sonnets, but through policy briefs.
Building a campaign without the poetry
Of course, this was no accident but formed a strategic choice for a party who just a few years ago found themselves consigned to an electoral wilderness.
To hack first-past-the-post they didn’t need a risky Blair 97’ or Obama 08’ style movement; they just had to get the ‘we’re not the Tories’ message out to enough voters in marginal seats.
As we all know, this decisively paid off; Labour won, and they won big. Inevitably, though, this shaky electoral pact was accompanied by a wave of anxiety.
Their landslide was described by a slew of commentators as being ‘a mile wide and an inch deep’, reflecting a sense that it could be lost as quickly as it was won. Perhaps this is an unavoidable side effect of campaigning only in prose.
Why the Labour Party must conquer hearts, not just first past the post
The distinction between ‘poetry’ and ‘prose’ in political messaging also has interesting conceptual roots.
German philosopher Ernst Bloch talked in the 1930s of the power of what he called ‘anticipatory illumination’. Put simply, he was referring here to the often-irrational force of human hopefulness and its enduring desire to imagine better worlds.
At the same time, he saw this romanticism being exploited by the rising tide of fascism, which tried to turn it into a dangerous, exclusionary form of nostalgia.
But Bloch appreciated that political imagination shouldn’t be dismissed just because it can be manipulated. Instead of being merely a reactionary force, this kind of political imagination can prevent us from being complacent, allowing us to always strive for a better reality.
Returning to electoral politics, the 2016 Remain campaign shows that politicians and comms directors dismiss that intangible, emotional drive at their peril.
George Osborne expected his economic figures to be triumphantly self-evident, as reason and rationality embodied in credit ratings and GDP calculations. But they failed to tell a story; one, for example, of a continent that rebuilt itself from the ashes of trauma, fostering a period of peace unimaginable to previous generations.
Instead, this emotional space was left vacant for the Brexiteers to fill with simplistic tales of a mythologised Britain. OBR statistics simply could not compete with the rallying cry to restore the nation’s independence and sovereignty.
Towards a romantic technocracy?
But what lessons can Labour actually learn from the autopsies of these failed campaigns? Well, the first should be that 2029 may be a little too late to start tapping into the soul of the nation.
Starmer’s administration – while being ‘mission-driven’ and ‘unburdened by doctrine’ – should perhaps start to inject a little poetry into their governing too.
Take net zero, for instance. There’s a story there that goes beyond the legal specificities of oil and gas licences, or the UK’s wind power capacity, or the pivot towards small modular reactors.
It’s about our connection to the land, the very ground we walk on and the air we breathe and the rivers and the forests that sustain us. It’s about the future and allowing our descendants to have one.
There could be parallels made here to the sentiments that drive Reform’s reactionary posturing about ‘protecting’ our monuments and cultural heritage. In other words, the impulse to nurture the environment we grew up in, and the dream of passing it down to future generations, is enduring and universal. If this feeling is redirected towards productive good, then a more long-term public support towards, say, the green transition, can be forged.
This is not to say that it isn’t the hard slog of day-to-day policy work that has the most tangible impact on people’s lives.
But for better or for worse, there will always remain a feeling; the lingering memory of what was, the ever-tantalising hope of what could be. To deny this romantic impulse is only to place it into the hands of those who will exploit it and mould it into its most dangerous forms.
Perhaps the rational thing to do is to always leave a little room for the irrational, because in the end we will never truly have ‘had enough’ of dreaming.
