In the sunny garden of a local community centre in Thurrock, a relaxed-looking Keir Starmer, shirt sleeves rolled up, was surrounded by a buzz of television cameras, reporters and Labour party activists taking selfies.
Hundreds of miles away in North Yorkshire, Rishi Sunak, who had cancelled a press event on Saturday amid the fallout from his D-day blunder, spent a quiet day in his constituency, nursing his wounds.
The contrast could not be more stark between the Tories’ floundering election campaign and the energy around Starmer, with Labour officials unable to believe their luck.
Just over three weeks earlier, before Sunak surprised everybody by announcing a summer election, the Labour leader had launched his “first steps” for government in the Tory-held Essex seat.
“Back then we didn’t know the prime minister was about to call the general election, but it’s so good he did because the whole country has been longing for this to come,” Starmer told the crowd on Sunday. “This is the point where the power goes to you, the voters, to make a choice.”
The fact that Starmer has spent so much of the campaign so far in southern seats underlines the scale of Labour’s ambition at this election – reaching deep into areas that Labour hasn’t held since it was last in power.
“We need to win everywhere. We lost very badly in 2019, so our strategy has always been that we’ve got to win everywhere. I want to win everywhere,” Starmer said in an interview with the Guardian.
“There are plenty of voters who didn’t vote for us before in places like this, you might call the blue wall … who will be prepared to look again at a changed Labour party and say, ‘That better aligns with what I care about.’
“Quite a number of them, I think, will be dismayed that the party they may have voted for in the past has drifted away from [what] they actually thought they voted for.”
With some of the polls projecting a Labour landslide, one of Starmer’s biggest challenges is complacency. He makes a point of reminding himself every day that not a single vote has yet been cast.
The Labour leader has repeatedly said that economic stability, national security and border security are the “foundation” on which any government has to be based.
Yet he acknowledged the importance of giving voters hope. “It is true that people are pretty fed up with what happened in the last 14 years and have said, ‘I’ve had enough of that,’” he said.
“But plenty times in history we’ve had pretty awful Conservative governments and yet Labour hasn’t got it over the line. It’s not automatic that people get to the position that I think they’re coming to now, of wanting to put their belief in Labour.”
Starmer agreed the manifesto would just be the baseline of what a Labour government would hope to achieve. In 1997, Tony Blair promised to cut NHS waiting lists by 100,000 but ended up eradicating them. “Absolutely. Exactly that.”
So far, the election campaign has been as notable for what policies have not been mentioned by the parties as which have.
One of them is childcare, but Starmer plans to address that by announcing plans to create thousands of new nursery places in primary schools for children from nine months old.
Another is university funding, after Starmer abandoned his leadership pledge to abolish tuition fees to prioritise cutting NHS waiting lists. There has since been speculation the party was considering some form of graduate tax.
“The way the system works at the moment doesn’t work for students. It doesn’t work for universities. I think we should change the whole approach, and obviously we’re working on what that would look like, and there is a range of options,” he said.
“We will be looking at a fairer way overall, for students and actually for universities.”
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The social care crisis, which Boris Johnson promised so memorably “to fix once and for all” when he entered Downing Street, has also been met with virtual silence.
“We do need to fix the social care problem, there’s no doubt about that, and we will pick it up and do so,” Starmer said.
“What we don’t want is something that’s still being talked about in five or 10 years. I want to make sure that on day one, we can start on the most pressing problem, which is the staff problem.”
Labour would bring in a fair pay agreement for social care workers as well as national standards to help address the issue of staff operating to different authorities or private companies.
Brexit, which dominated the last election campaign, barely gets a mention, yet Starmer denied he was “scared” of talking about the issue.
He said he was “determined” to build a “closer, better” relationship with the EU. “It was a botched deal from Johnson. He didn’t much care what it looked like, he just wanted to claim he’d got something over the line.
“Businesses are feeling the effect of that. Our education research is feeling the effects of that. Increasingly, in light of what’s happened in Ukraine, it’s clear we need a better set of defence and security arrangements with Europe.”
Both parties have been criticised for not being honest with the British public over the state of the economy, with the Institute for Fiscal Studies highlighting about £18bn of cuts ahead. Starmer has repeatedly said he has no plans to return to austerity.
“I want to break out of the mindset that says the only levers you can pull are tax and spend. [We have] the lever of growth. The single biggest problem of the last 14 years is that the economy hasn’t grown quickly.”
Labour has pledged that it will not increase VAT, national insurance or income tax in office, and has said that its plans are fully funded and would not require any tax rises.
However, Rachel Reeves is under pressure from shadow ministers to raise capital gains tax [CGT] as part of an autumn budget at which she is also considering up to a dozen new revenue-raising measures.
Starmer declined to rule out a Labour government increasing CGT in future, amid speculation he could go some way towards equalising it with income tax.
“I’m not going to write five years’ worth of budgets three and a half, four weeks before an election,” he said.
“But I am going to say we’re fully costed, fully funded, and that none of our plans require tax rises over and above the ones we’ve already set.”
