Blair has raised the alarm over the flaw at the heart of the Starmer project

When it all starts to go wrong for Keir Starmer, Tony Blair will at least be able to say that he sounded the alarm early. “People are elected on the basis that they are changemakers, because they’ve articulated a general vision for change,” he complained in an interview this week. “But what does that really mean, in specific terms?... If you don’t do that hard work and really dig deep, what you end up with are just ambitions. They remain ambitions.”

He was too polite to say so, but this perfectly sums up the 2024 Labour Party manifesto. It’s a blancmange of grand ambitions with almost no discernible agenda. And, as such, a big missed opportunity.

Starmer will perhaps never be more powerful than he is now. This is the time to seek a direct mandate for difficult NHS reform, to supercharge the “Academies” schools agenda, to ask voter approval for any politically tricky reforms. But instead, Starmer has campaigned like a pull-string doll programmed with cliches and generalisations, and is choosing the safest route to power.

He’ll win big next week: not even the Conservatives would bet against that. But it seems that the scale of Labour’s victory will be out of all proportion to its votes. The party is now slowly losing support and is barely scraping 40 per cent, a two-year low. But the Westminster voting system (and Nigel Farage’s Tory-slaying handiwork) will mean it is on course to win about 70 per cent of the seats in the Commons.

First-past-the-post is designed to exaggerate upper hands, to deliver decisive results. But a 40:70 ratio would be the biggest skew in the history of the universal franchise.

From the outside, it will look like Britain has lurched to the Left. In fact, the support for the two conservative parties (Reform and the Tories) could add up to about 35 per cent, not far behind Labour. What’s more, Starmer’s personal satisfaction ratings are lower than any Opposition leader who made it to office. Lower, even, than those of Neil Kinnock in 1992 or Jeremy Corbyn in 2017. The country has certainly turned away from the Tories, but it has not really swung towards Labour.

An audience member in the final television debate summed up the sense of despair, asking Starmer and Rishi Sunak if they are “really the best we’ve got to be the next prime minister of our great country”. It’s normal for an outgoing PM to poll badly. But what makes this election stand out is the lack of any enthusiasm for the Opposition leader, or the absence of any discernible Opposition agenda.

It has been a festival of political despair. This is the Starmer paradox: power without popularity. Majority without a mandate.

For what, exactly, will Starmer have a specific mandate – other than taxing private schools and eliminating non-doms? Putting plans in a manifesto is as close as you can get to a magic ticket in British government. It can be used as a direct democratic mandate, silencing striking doctors and party rebels. Any manifesto pledge is guaranteed to pass the House of Lords.

It’s an incredible opportunity that Starmer simply isn’t taking – presumably because he has absolutely no ideas.

He may start to look for them once safely inside in No 10, but that can take years – as history shows. The Thatcher revolution began with the foundation of the Centre for Policy Studies five years before her election. Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reform agenda had been cooking for years in his think tank, the Centre for Social Justice. The Blair school and hospital reforms were devised in office (helped by the Social Market Foundation) but that took most of his first term.

Starmer can coast off the results of Sunak’s reforms at first: lower NHS waiting lists and immigration numbers. But avoiding the winter NHS crises, reversing the surge in welfare or remedying Britain’s scandalous cancer survival rates will require bold, radical and politically difficult plans that simply do not exist right now.

Perhaps Starmer thought that, if he went down this road, it would hurt his majority. That any idea would present a target, which he has been determined not to do.

With a big majority in a country still fairly evenly split between Right and Left, it would make sense for Starmer to go for reforms that would have broad national appeal. Perhaps the kind of NHS or welfare reform that the Tories would have done if they were braver.

Wes Streeting, Jonathan Ashworth and Darren Jones are the party’s best reformist hopes. But take them away, and who do we have left?

Blair had to nurture and promote reformers in his own ranks (John Reid, Alan Milburn, Andrew Adonis) before taking on the rest of his party. Starmer shows no interest in this at all.

Streeting was recently in Australia, looking for ideas on how to run a health service better (the world is not short of examples). If he is minded to act on this inspiration, he should lose no time. A huge majority could be used to think the unthinkable on NHS reform. But it’s hard, almost impossible, to see Streeting winning a Labour Cabinet over to this agenda – even if he were minded to pursue it.

Welfare will be the unexploded bomb under the Starmer government, with numbers now rising in a way that will leave huge bills and a debilitating economic disadvantage. But reversing this will mean the kind of tough-love reform that Labour has spent the past 14 years attacking.

It may take Starmer about nine months to realise that he has no alternative but to start tightening sanctions and doing what the Tories had no stomach to do after the pandemic. But how will he persuade his troops to conduct that about-turn?

Blair made another point in that interview. When you’re running for office, he said, you need to be a great persuader. But “the moment you get into office, you really have to be the great chief executive. Those two skill sets are completely different. A lot of political leaders fail because they’ve failed to make the transition.”

And if those leaders have no agenda to execute? Starmer may soon be about to show us how that story ends.