This week in Azerbaijan, we saw Keir Starmer honing the art of delivering different messages to different audiences.
An essential survival skill in politics, it feels like the new backroom team in Number 10 are finding their feet as they attempt to wrestle the challenging political landscape more to their advantage.
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A new approach was rolled out at the COP climate change summit in Baku.
The prime minister turned up with a daunting announcement which flies in the face of prevailing political orthodoxy. Sir Keir arrived preparing to announce an even more ambitious climate change target for the UK, after two years of the Tories diluting their climate promises believing this was in tune with the British public opinion.
It is undoubtedly bold. At the point where Donald Trump was calling climate change a “hoax”, here was a British prime minister doubling down and going further: demanding the UK eradicate 81% of emissions by 2035. This is a significant advance on the previous Tory promise to reduce 67% of emissions by 2030.
This puts the UK in the front rank of countries with the most ambitious asks on climate. Here in Baku, this is a significant change from one of the most senior leaders to come to the summit, and was welcomed at once by environmental groups.
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But on its own today’s climate announcement is not a message not without its difficulties.
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Rather like an unfunded spending commitment, there is no clear plan for how to deliver on this new, higher ambition. Sir Keir insisted he had no intention of telling people to change how to live their lives. Does this mean accelerating plans to force people to give up gas boilers, more incentives for people to switch to electric cars or some kind of incentive to force people to eat less meat?
This is not a straightforward message to sell. So Downing Street came armed with a plan to sell it differently to voters back home.
In interviews and from the podium, his was not a message about new targets and pain, but a chance to preach about the “green opportunity”. He wanted to talk about how ambitious climate targets are accelerating the transition to green energy which helps support his economic goal to boost growth.
This appears to be part of a wider strategy from Number 10.
On the way out, Keir Starmer sought to link as much of his current work as possible to two new “priorities” – boosting economic growth and protecting Britain’s borders. So green policies must now be linked to growth in order to make it more voter-friendly.
This is part of a wider switch.
Rather than the five “missions” of the election campaign, which even senior Labour figures admitted were esoteric, all Starmer’s other goals can now be wrapped underneath these two “priorities” which we will be hearing a lot about in the future – boosting growth and protecting borders.
It is no coincidence these two priorities mirror the two themes of Donald Trump’s campaign, although it is too simplistic to say they have simply been borrowed.
I understand work on rethinking the way the missions are talked about in public has been going on since before the Labour conference in September.
However, it is the latest overhaul of the approach designed to simplify the PM’s message to the voters. We will see if this technique works as well on this side of the Atlantic.
