Why Starmer wants to keep talking about Farage

“Know yourself and know your enemy,” wrote Sun Tzu, the Chinese military adviser from the 6th century BC. “In a hundred battles, you will never be defeated.”

Sir Keir Starmer might not quite have 100 battles, but he’s got a fair few on his hands: with his party, with the bond markets, with the mayor of Greater Manchester.

And yet the prime minister, who still helms an enormous Commons majority, has a resolute focus on who the singular enemy is.

And it’s a party with five MPs: Reform UK.

Time and again, Sir Keir has chosen during Labour’s conference week to focus on Nigel Farage, having written off the Conservatives as “dead” and barely mentioning the Lib Dems, Greens or other parties eating into Labour support from the left.

But in the lanyard-laden fringes and bars in Liverpool, there is a live conversation about the wisdom of this strategy.

Does naming your enemy so publicly help bring focus to the government’s operation and attack? Or does it risk elevating Reform UK, a new party with no record in government, to an elite status which only serves to bolster rather than damage them?

Reform UK love it. Whenever the prime minister goes out of his way to mock or ridicule them during PMQs, Farage and his MPs including Richard Tice and Lee Anderson slap their thighs in pantomime laughter, believing they are being paid a high compliment.

At the weekend, Sir Keir said the fight with Reform is different. “Most elections have always been Labour or Conservative,” he said.

“This is a different election that we are facing. We have not had a proposition like Reform in this country ever before. This is a different fight. It is a fight about who we are as a country, it goes to the soul of our future.”

Some in Liverpool this week have likened this to Joe Biden’s repeated refrain against Donald Trump in 2020 that they were locked in a “battle for the soul of the nation”.

However, some within Labour are unsure if the strategy of attacking Farage is the right approach.

One backbench MP from the North East told me that those in Downing Street advising the PM “don’t get it” – and don’t represent “white, working class council estates” with voters that worry about immigration.

“They tend to be the frothy coffee drinking liberal lefties. They are speaking to the same people,” they added.

Others suggest that keeping Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative party alive, or at least their share of the vote up, is needed to split the vote on the right.

One senior minister said: “The Tories being dead doesn’t help us, it just pushes people to Reform. It’s a bit like how at the last general election we needed the Lib Dems to do well, as they took seats off the Tories rather than us.

“But this is worse, because both Tory and Labour are voters shifting to Reform. In places from Barnsley to Bexley, we need the right vote to split, and then we need to squeeze Lib Dems and the Greens to come down the middle.”

John Denham, a minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in the last Labour government, agrees.

“It makes no sense to me to elevate Reform to that position, even if you think the Tories are dead,” he told me on BBC Radio 5 Live.

“We have four years left of this government. The idea that the only thing we think we can offer in four years time is ‘well, at least we’re not Reform’… surely to God we can do something with the huge majority we’ve got and the time we’ve got to tell a convincing story that marginalizes Reform.”

He suggested that there were a “really very small” group of people who might switch between Reform and Labour.

The latest YouGov poll suggests just over half of Labour’s 2024 voters are sticking with them.

Some 12% have switched to Reform, and 4% to the Conservatives, while another 13% have gone to the Lib Dems, 12% to the Greens, and others have gone to the SNP and Plaid Cymru, suggesting losses to the left are far greater than to the right.

However, Tom Lubbock, from pollsters JL Partners, thinks focussing on Reform UK is “extremely smart politics”.

“If you look at Labour voters who are undecided at the moment, if you force that choice and say it’s a choice between Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage, a lot of them who are undecided will come back into the Labour boat.

“And, you know, there’s a lot of time to go before that next election, but it’s actually very smart at the moment to make that the choice.”

Previous party leaders and governments have faced this choice about how to deal with insurgent parties under Farage. Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, made around 30 references to Farage in his conference speech last week.

Simon Lewis, a former director of communications for Gordon Brown, said: “The risk is that you are seen to be taking your opponent too seriously.

“Multiple references to his name probably gets people thinking, goodness, these guys are really scared about Reform. And I think you do have to be very careful.”

Number 10 insiders defend the strategy, and insist the PM is adamant that the country is at a crossroads, and he thinks it is his responsibility to stand up to Farage.

So what do Reform make of party leaders falling over themselves to namecheck them and their leader?

“It made us laugh,” said Gawain Towler, a former press adviser to Farage. “We love it. We absolutely love it! It’s so preposterous.”

Listen to Matt Chorley on weekdays from 2pm on BBC Radio 5 Live.