The slow implosion of Keir Starmer’s government is the ultimate repudiation of ‘Labour minimalism’ | Andy Beckett

This dominant tradition in the party has long insisted on appeasing powerful interests. But it’s unsuited to modern times, says Guardian columnist Andy Beckett

Labour is a more complicated political party than most. For over a century, it has tried to contain warring traditions, philosophies and factions. Internal disagreements have been driven not just by personal rivalries, but by profound differences about how, and how much, to challenge Britain’s deeply embedded arrangements of power and wealth.

The party’s current crisis, while most directly caused by Keir Starmer’s political shortcomings and the chillingly selective morality of Peter Mandelson, is really the result of one Labour tradition demonstrably failing in government to meet the needs of today’s world. Often dominant in the party, especially over the past 40 years, you could call that tradition Labour minimalism.

Labour minimalists believe that England is a fundamentally conservative, right-leaning country, in which the party can only succeed electorally and in government by appearing as moderate and unthreatening to powerful interests as possible. In 1985, in his first act as a senior party figure, Mandelson commissioned a report by a fellow Labour minimalist, the political analyst Philip Gould. “Positive perceptions of the Labour party tend to be outweighed by negative concerns,” wrote Gould, “particularly [about] unacceptable ‘beyond the pale’ figures.” Provocative leftwing MPs, bold-sounding leftwing policies, fierce leftwing rhetoric: all should be pared back, marginalised or dropped altogether, the two men agreed, so that Labour could reposition itself advantageously on the centre ground.

First under Neil Kinnock, then Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and finally Starmer, minimalism became the party’s operating principle. Labour politics became about discipline, self-denial and self-control; about saying no to spending commitments, selecting the least risky candidates and removing key areas of public life – such as the setting of interest rates – from politics altogether. Meanwhile less careful, more radical Labour leaders – Jeremy Corbyn, and to a lesser extent, Ed Miliband – were branded naive by the minimalists and viciously briefed against in the media.

While the Tories veered around wildly in office, U-turning and switching between ideologies to barely a word of criticism from the rightwing press, the Labour hierarchy filled up with micromanagers, constantly trying to avoid negative coverage. Mandelson told me in 1996: “The small things are very important in politics: you can trip up, fall flat on your face over the most unexpected things … My job as much as anything is to look for the small things, and make sure that others don’t trip over them.”

Yet as Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and Labour’s often careless dealings with the rich showed, the party’s micromanagers did not always apply their cautious rules to themselves. This was plainly hypocritical, but also revealed a paradox: that this caution bred recklessness.

One of Labour minimalism’s key characteristics was its acceptance of much of the social status quo, which increasingly meant accepting extreme wealth. “We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich,” as Mandelson famously said in 1998, “as long as they pay their taxes.” Since then, Labour governments have kept taxes on the rich low by European standards, while often praising them as wealth creators.

The party has also deferred to other, more modestly privileged right-leaning voters, from prosperous home counties homeowners to socially conservative white men in the “red wall”. Minimalist Labour politicians rarely challenge the views or interests of such groups, or of the truly powerful, and are sometimes welcomed into elite circles in return – as Mandelson discovered to his initial delight and eventual ruin.

In 1997, 2001 and 2024, this conciliatory approach helped Labour win huge Commons majorities, far bigger than those achieved by the Tories over the same period. In some ways, the last of these three victories was Labour minimalism’s peak: a list of candidates purged of almost all leftists, a new prime minister who had shed almost all his past radical commitments and a modest total vote concentrated for maximum effect. McSweeney, who had orchestrated Starmer’s rise to the leadership through a pressure group, Labour Together, which at times had barely any members, seemed the ultimate minimalist, narrowing the party to a sharp point.

Yet since arriving in office, Labour has discovered to its bewilderment that, outside the party, politics has moved on. Populism is not minimalist but maximalist: huge promises, larger than life leaders, extravagant rhetoric. As well as the startling 30% of the electorate who now say they would vote for Reform UK, there are millions of others with great fears and yearnings, the products of economic, technological and environmental upheaval.

The days when enough voters could be satisfied with gradual, understated reforms – as they often were under Blair – feel long gone. Many Britons may insist they hate politicians, or find politics incomprehensible or boring, but the anger they show in vox pops, at protests and online is an acknowledgment that politics, in its broadest sense, has become important again. In an inflamed atmosphere, Labour’s shrunken politics does not resonate.

Strikingly, the few popular Starmer policies are the more expansive, less minimalist ones, such as improving workers’ rights and rolling out clean energy. They naturally please green activists, trade unions and many progressive voters; but perhaps they also appeal more widely because they show some appreciation that, in a time of crisis, politics needs to be on a bigger scale.

Whether or not Starmer’s premiership lasts much longer, and whoever wins the ever more obvious contest to succeed him, there suddenly seems agreement across Labour that the government should be bolder, more inclusive and truer to the party’s more egalitarian values. In other words, the minimalist politics practised so effectively and then so disastrously by Mandelson and McSweeney is out, for now at least.

Since his political near-death experience, Starmer has sounded less constrained in public. Of his possible successors, Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham are probably too sweeping in their critiques of modern Britain to become wholly cautious prime ministers; and even Wes Streeting – long the preferred choice of Labour control freaks – has been speaking out on topics outside his brief, such as the far right and Gaza.

Labour appears to have belatedly realised that the era of small politics is over. But to prevent what may be an epic political disaster – Britain’s first government of the populist hard right – it will almost certainly need to make alliances and compromises with other parties. In politics as in life, sometimes the more control you seek, the less you ultimately get.

• Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist