Pete Kavanaugh, deputy campaign director to Biden in 2020; Muthoni Wambu Kraal, who built a winning electoral coalition at the grass roots that year; Amy Dacey, once chief executive of the Democratic National Convention — these are the kinds of people who remain in constant conversation with Labour on how exactly the left defies stereotype and fights the right on the ground it usually owns.
This is a shared project with a shared infrastructure. Claire Ainsley, once director of policy for Starmer, has made much of this transatlantic traffic happen from her post at the Progressive Policy Institute, the favoured think tank of the White House. And next week Labour is sending its own delegation to the Democratic convention in Chicago, led by its victorious general secretary David Evans, and Jon Ashworth, whose failure to retain his Leicester South seat has obscured the extent of his influence over an otherwise successful campaign.
The challenge now is to keep speaking the same language. Recession looms over America. Starmer may yet end up on the wrong side of Britain’s fraught debate on migration. And party strategists are not their parties, whose habits are harder to shift. “The jury is still out,” frets one influential Labour MP. Some fear that “wet and self-important” Labour backbenchers, as well as West Coast liberals, will revert to type rather than adopt this new lingua franca. For the time being, though, Harris and Starmer are protagonists created by the same writers’ room.
