Here’s how Keir Starmer plans to win next year’s election

We usually lose,” Pat McFadden, Labour’s election campaign coordinator, told a recent meeting of the 31-strong shadow cabinet. As he looked round the table, he counted only four other shadow ministers who had been part of an election-winning team.

The Conservatives have been in power for 67 of the past 100 years, and Labour for just 33. Only three Labour leaders – Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair – have ever won an overall Commons majority. So while Keir Starmer looks likely to become the fourth in 2024, he knows he cannot take victory for granted. Many Labour minds remain haunted by two elections the party expected to win – in 1992 and 2015 – and lost.

Maintaining a huge lead in the opinion polls, currently at 18 points, has bred greater confidence and, among some inexperienced frontbenchers, perhaps even a little complacency. McFadden’s message to the shadow cabinet was designed to stamp out any hint of it, as Starmer is quick to do whenever he sniffs it.

The Labour leader’s safety-first approach offers an insight into how he will handle what could be the UK’s longest, dirtiest and most expensive election campaign.

Caution is Starmer’s watchword, to the frustration of his natural allies on the party’s soft left. “Because of the opinion polls, there’s a danger the leadership starts to believe its own propaganda,” one Labour adviser admitted. Such critics fear the absence of a clearer, bolder election offer would leave an incoming Labour government without a guiding star, rudderless and blown about by events. But Starmer’s caution is working; he won’t suddenly be transformed into a risk-taker.

His own guiding star is that Labour must prove its credibility on both the economy and national security – sometimes weak areas for the party, including under Jeremy Corbyn – before it can win voters’ trust for its wider offer.

Contrary to some expectations, the Labour manifesto will not be a firework display of new policies. But there will be some retail offers within the existing policy framework – for example, more detail on Labour’s plan to expand childcare, partly by providing nurseries in primary schools.

Starmer has ordered his frontbench team to complete their plans by mid-January so that a draft manifesto can be finalised by 8 February. Labour is talking up the prospect of a May general election – partly to ensure the party is ready, and partly so it can accuse Rishi Sunak of running scared if he delays the contest until the autumn, as I expect he will.

Is Labour ready for power? The answer is that some shadow ministers are more ready than others. “The offer is not fully baked yet,” one insider admitted to me.

Sue Gray, the former senior civil servant who is now Starmer’s chief of staff, is putting all the plans under the microscope in what Labour insiders describe as a forensic “bomb-proofing exercise”.

She is said to have been less than impressed with the policies of some frontbenchers. The hope is that her work will improve a Starmer government’s “first 100 days” programme so that the party will have momentum and not be frozen by its dire economic inheritance. “We will need some quick wins, to show how we are making a difference,” one Labour source said. “We won’t be able to blame everything on the Tories for ever.”

Some policies will be “refined”, according to Labour insiders. The flagship pledge to spend £28bn a year on green investment, already delayed until the second half of a five-year parliament, will probably be further revised downwards in the hope of neutering Tory claims it would mean higher taxes and borrowing.

Tweaks to Starmer’s “five missions” for a Labour government on the party’s website hint at his priorities – plans to build 1.5 million homes in five years are seen as a key driver of growth, and the “green prosperity plan” will be sold as a way to reduce energy bills.

Labour will stick to its plans to fund limited public spending pledges by imposing VAT on private schools, ending non-domicile tax status, and scrapping a tax break for private equity executives, raising a total of about £5.8bn.

Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, insists she has no further plans to raise taxes, though that could change after the election. She would have to decide whether to accept £20bn of cuts to departmental budgets over the next few years, which are included in the Tories’ plans. Reeves could square the circle through a review of the many tax reliefs; she might be tempted to close loopholes that benefit the rich.

The Tories will throw the kitchen sink at Labour generally, and at Starmer personally, trying to make the election a referendum on Labour’s fitness for office rather than their party’s own record (no prizes for guessing why). Starmer will continue to prove a small and elusive target. But the Labour leader does have gaps in his armour. Some allies fear his “chopping and changing” on policy – ditching some of the pledges of the “Corbynism without Corbyn” platform on which he won the leadership – will allow the Tories to argue that he would also say one thing before the general election and do another afterwards. This makes it harder for Labour to present Starmer as the man of integrity that his allies are sure he is.

Although Corbyn has been banned from standing as a Labour candidate, the Tories and their newspaper cheerleaders will ask why Starmer wanted Corbyn to be prime minister, and to serve in his shadow cabinet.

The answer, it seems, is that it would take someone trusted by the hard left to steer Labour away from a 2019 election platform that brought the party’s heaviest defeat since 1935. Otherwise, Starmer allies say, Labour would have elected another Corbynista, Rebecca Long-Bailey, as his successor.

In the new year, Starmer will portray himself as the change candidate the country desperately needs. He is certainly a more credible changemaker than Sunak, whose flirtation with the label was quickly abandoned. Starmer is ahead of Sunak when voters are asked who would be the best PM, though many harbour doubts about the Labour leader, and he is less popular than Blair was in the run-up to the 1997 election.

With the Tories in such a perilous position, perhaps it will not matter. Yet Labour strategists know Sunak’s party will fight like hell to retain power against the odds, and they privately accept that the Tories are good at it.

Starmer’s allies argue that his refusal to call for a permanent ceasefire in Israel and Gaza, which angered many in his party, has bolstered his credentials as a PM-in-waiting, as it is an example of the tough choices he would have to make in government. There would be no shortage of them given the grim economic picture.

While some Tories suspect Starmer of deliberately lowering expectations in order that he can “underpromise and overdeliver”, this doesn’t stand up. Starmer and Reeves, unlike Blair and Gordon Brown in 1997, would inherit a flatlining economy. Securing growth, in a partnership with business that he genuinely believes in, will be Starmer’s top priority. Without growth, rebuilding our crumbling public services will not be possible.

First, Labour has to win. To end its run of four consecutive defeats, Starmer’s party will need to become as good in attack as it is in defence. It will need to pierce the Tories’ armour more quickly and more frequently, and to set out a positive vision that gives the one in five undecided voters hope that Labour would do better than a Tory party exhausted after 14 years in power.