Tony Blair’s former advertising guru has warned Keir Starmer does not have the “urgently needed” plan required to tackle the rise of populists such as Nigel Farage.
Sir Chris Powell, the brother of the prime minister’s national security adviser Jonathan Powell, called for a fundamental reset within Labour, saying there were just three years left to stop the “new and terrifying threat”.
Allowing Mr Farage’s Reform UK, which has said it plans to spend £5m fighting May’s local elections, to be seen as credible leaders in government without sufficient challenge would make the party appear less threatening, he said, while waiting and hoping for them to fail is “potentially suicidal for our freedom and democracy”.
In a double whammy for the PM, a former senior aide has also hit out at the “weirdness of how Whitehall spends its time” as he urged Sir Keir to scrap the pension triple lock and smash what he dubbed the “stakeholder state”.
Writing for The Guardian, Sir Chris said: “Where is the urgently needed counter plan on a huge scale, to thwart and head off such an existential threat? It is simply not in place, nor does it appear to be even at the planning stage.
“We are at a very dangerous moment. We simply cannot afford to allow Reform UK to have a free run, and become established and entrenched as a credible potential government in the minds of disenchanted voters.
“The longer they go unchallenged, the more unthreatening and risk-free they will seem to voters. Just hoping that Reform UK and Farage implode, or that the right-wing vote will somehow fracture, is potentially suicidal for our freedom and democracy.”
The outpouring of advice to the PM comes as Sir Keir’s position is increasingly under pressure, with Labour still trailing Reform UK in the polls and widely expected to suffer heavy losses in the local, Scottish and Welsh elections in May.
He is expected to highlight measures designed to tackle the cost of living, such as recent cuts to energy costs, due to take effect in April, and the abolition of the controversial two-child benefit cap, at an event on Monday.
A Labour source said the government was “tackling the problems that populists exploit, in particular the cost of living”.
But Sir Charles, who ran the advertising agency that worked on Labour’s 1997 landslide election victory, warned that Labour’s social media engagement had so far been “small scale” in comparison to Reform and that the “narrative” surrounding the government was often more “about its own failings and internal conflicts than the battle it faces against a populist surge”.
Sir Charles, who has set up a Winning Against Populists project, said the UK was currently a “textbook case of an establishment party caught in the headlights, as its populist opponent expertly fills the vacuum of voter pain and disrespect”.
Meanwhile, Mr Ovenden warned that the case of British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah was a “totem of the ceaseless sapping of time and energy by people obsessed with fringe issues”, with the government occupied by “flim-flam”.
Mr Fattah, who returned to the UK after being released from Egyptian detention in September, has been forced to apologise for comments he previously made online as far back as 2010, when he appeared to call for violence against the police and Zionists.
Yvette Cooper has ordered an urgent Foreign Office review into “serious information failures” surrounding his case amid growing calls for him to be deported after the emergence of the historic tweets.
Writing in The Times, Mr Ovenden, who left government after derogatory sexual remarks he made about Diane Abbott in 2017 were revealed, said: “Fattah’s sudden crashing into public consciousness has revealed the sheer weirdness of how Whitehall spends its time.”
He argued power had shifted away from voters towards groups with the “time, money and institutional access to make themselves too important to ignore”.
He called on the government to roll back environmental regulations, cut spending on welfare and scrap the “triple-lock” on the state pension, which guarantees it will rise by at least 2 per cent a year.
He added: “We don’t have to keep picking the pockets of the productive parts of our economy in order to fund inflation-busting pension increases for millionaires or an unsustainable welfare system.”
