Renew Labour, Renew Britain? Starmer needs more than a good conference
2 October 2025 | Richard Parry
By Richard Parry, Director
The government’s failings on narrative and communication have been visible for some time. At the end of last year’s Labour conference, I wrote:
“Poor presentation today affects the judgement of future matters of substance. It erodes trust, political capital, and belief in competence, upon which the government will need to call when delivering the more contentious parts of their agenda.
Furthermore, it suggests a deficit in strategic thinking about narrative, which will need to be addressed before sterner challenges ahead if the benefits of the coming reforms in planning, energy and infrastructure are to be demonstrated to the country.”
However, the pace of the government’s descent into crisis surpassed my expectations. I would not have expected a year ago that this year’s gathering in Liverpool would be an existential test of Keir Starmer’s premiership.
And yet it was. The discontent among MPs is palpable, the positioning of would-be successors thinly disguised.
Supporters of the Prime Minister will be leaving Liverpool with some confidence that the immediate hazards have so far been averted. The urgent risk of an open internal conflict instigated by Andy Burnham has dissipated, largely through his own ill-judged interventions presenting as both disloyalty and personal ambition. And in his own speech, Starmer belatedly began to define the sense of purpose that internal Labour critics have been calling for, while developing a clear narrative of attack on Reform UK.
But this was the easy bit.
This year’s conference was the first, and most straightforward, of three events which could conceivably precipitate the end of Starmer’s premiership. Next comes the Budget, at which Rachel Reeves is likely to have to plug a shortfall of over £20bn to meet her fiscal rules. It remains unclear if this can be achieved while maintaining private sector confidence in growth and investment, without breaking manifesto pledges on tax, and avoiding a backbench revolt.
This will be followed by next May’s elections, at which Labour will lose councillors, mayors, and devolved representatives. Parties will contest council seats last polled in 2022 at the height of Partygate, when Labour won 3,073 seats on 35% of the vote. If current polling is maintained into next year, losses will be severe. Poor local election results tend to focus MPs’ minds as they reflect on the peril of their own electoral position, and deal with the frustration of local councillors who have lost their seats due to national swings. MPs are also reliant on councillors for local campaigning infrastructure, delivering leaflets and knocking on doors.
These discrete challenges are far from trivial. But the government also needs to address a broader, structural problem. To date, they have struggled to prosecute their arguments in a fragmented public discourse. The days of mass-readership of newspapers are long gone; today, nearly three times more people get their news from social media. The online environment is in turn decentralised, with no single digital ‘town square’ through which news is consumed and debated. Labour has not yet shown the aptitude required to adapt to this – on TikTok, Reform UK gets almost 14 times the engagement than the other main political parties.
This structural challenge extends beyond government. Any organisation engaged in contentious debates about policy has to contend with these dynamics – that’s part of Quatro’s work for clients across the country – but unlike an agile communications agency, the government has a large institutional architecture that isn’t optimised for a world where opinion is formed on disparate online spaces.
If the government is to succeed, this needs to change. The positive vision of Britain and the attack on Reform UK set out in Keir Starmer’s speech are viable political narratives, but Labour will not succeed in embedding them in public discourse unless they address the wider structural communications problem at the heart of government alongside their immediate challenges.
Quatro PR helps clients across England and Wales create and tell stories, navigating traditional and social media to achieve campaign success.