abour is daring to hope again. Six months on from a cataclysmic defeat, the party is feeling much better about itself than it did in December last year when Corbynite delusions were smashed by the voters. Then, many of the party’s residual MPs reckoned that it could be at least a decade before they had a chance of seeing power again. Now, it doesn’t seem quite so outlandish to imagine that they could be competitive at the next election. Labour is rapidly closing the deficit to the Tories in the polls and Sir Keir Starmer bests Boris Johnson when voters are asked to award approval ratings to the two men. Some of this has nothing to do with Labour and everything to do with Tory failings. The fiasco over an NHS app to track and trace infection and an enforced U-turn over free school meals are among the latest additions to the extremely long list of blundering responses to the coronavirus. The voters are running out of patience with the Johnson government’s excuses for its lethal amateurism. Credit for the change in Labour fortunes is also due to the calibre of Mr Starmer. He became leader on 4 April when the epidemic was approaching its peak and Britain was preparing for a lockdown Easter. He had to deliver his victory speech by video recorded in his front room. The conventional wisdom was that he would struggle to get his voice heard in such challenging circumstances. One of his achievements has been to confound that expectation by making Labour relevant to the crisis. He has done so with carefully calibrated critiques of the government’s performance. “Keir is good at getting the tone right,” says one of the shadow cabinet. When most of the country was still prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to the government, the Labour leader went with the grain of that mood by saying he would provide “constructive opposition”. As the public has grown disenchanted, he has amped up his attacks on ministerial incompetence. The opposition bit of his original formula has been a lot more noticeable recently than the constructive bit. He demonstrated a shrewd tactical sense on a very different issue when protesters toppled the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston. The shouty left demanded that the Labour leader praise the group who dragged the statue into Bristol harbour. All of the Tory party wanted him to salute the act so they could decry the Labour leader as an apologist for lawlessness. He instead said that the statue should have been removed long ago, but this was not the way to go about it. The polls subsequently confirmed that this was exactly where the vast majority of the public stood. His response to the Cummings scandal was that of a smart tactician. Mr Starmer harried the prime minister over his rule-breaking adviser and said he would have sacked him, but stopped short of making a ritual call for resignation. This was a canny calculation that it was much more damaging for Number 10 if Tory MPs led the clamour for Dominic Cummings to go. The cynic in me also suspects that Labour thought it best suited if Mr Cummings stayed at Number 10 as an enduring reminder to voters that it is one rule for them and another for the prime minister’s senior courtier. The Labour leader is getting under Mr Johnson’s thin skin. At prime minister’s questions, the Tory leader has taken to mocking his opposite number for being a lawyer. “Your witness, Mr Speaker,” he jeered during exchanges about the government’s failure to get young people back into school. There is indeed something very lawyerly about the Labour leader, but the public does not seem to be holding that against him. He is enjoying the best approval ratings for any opposition leader since another Labour lawyer, one called Tony Blair, was on his march towards Number 10 in the mid-1990s. It helps that the great majority of the parliamentary party are united behind him and the Labour frontbench is relishing the novel sensation of being professionally led. I recently talked to one shadow cabinet member who served on that body during the grisly Corbyn years. He launched into a torrent of praise for Mr Starmer’s qualities as a leader: “Just brilliant… focused… very hardworking… disciplined… a really smart operator…” The encomium became so lavish that he eventually laughed: “I know I sound like I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.” Or perhaps that should be the Keir-Aid. All of which is flattering to the Labour leader and encouraging for the party’s supporters. It is also potentially dangerous. The peril is that Labour will be seduced by the idea that being an effective opposition against a government that is currently flailing is all it has to do. There is a necessary corrective to any complacency in a 153-page report from Labour Together, a party group that has been inquiring into the December election. The analysis echoes previous studies by putting the defeat down to the fatal combination of a voter-repulsive leader, divisions over Brexit, a rubbish campaign and public incredulity that Labour could ever deliver on its gift catalogue manifesto. The report also highlights the long-term and deep-seated decay in the party’s support in what we used to call Labour’s heartlands before the Tories bulldozed the “red wall”. What makes the report telling is its authorship. Those responsible include Ed Miliband, the former Labour leader restored to the shadow cabinet by the current one. The analysis reflects thinking on the party’s soft left, the Starmer kind of people who now occupy most of the significant posts in the shadow cabinet. One of its authors tells me: “Keir loves this report.” It is a fair assumption that its thoughts broadly reflect his own. The authors begin by noting that Labour “has a mountain to climb”. That is an understatement. Jeremy Corbyn led the party to such an abysmal defeat that Labour has been crushed down to its lowest level of parliamentary representation since 1935. This is masked at the moment by the socially distanced parliament in which less than a tenth of MPs can be present in the chamber of the Commons at any one time. When it is functioning normally again, the brute imbalance between Labour and Tory parliamentary strength will be physically manifest again. To win next time, Labour will have to increase its total number of seats by 60%, a feat the party has not achieved since 1945. A key contention of the report is that it is “a mistake” to think that “a different leader, with Brexit no longer the defining issue, would in itself be sufficient to change Labour’s electoral fortunes”. I am told that the Labour leader does not demur. “Keir would say that himself,” remarks one frontbencher. The report concludes that Labour will only achieve power again by building “a winning coalition of voters that spans generations, geographies and outlooks”. This is so right that it is a truism. Labour only secures parliamentary majorities, as it did under Attlee, Wilson and Blair and has not under any other leader, when it assembles a broad coalition. The report isn’t so useful when it comes to precisely how Labour can fashion an appeal that embraces younger, liberal metropolitan voters, reconnects with lost supporters in the traditional heartlands and wins over swing voters, including those in the south of England without whom Labour cannot get to a parliamentary majority. In their vagueness about how this feat is to be achieved, the report’s authors are faithful reflections of the party’s leader. Mr Starmer has had almost nothing to say about policy since he became leader. He has been stronger as a prosecutor of the government than he has been as the advocate of a Labour alternative. One shadow cabinet member defends this approach by saying: “No one is ready to hear what a Labour government would do. The summit of our ambition at the moment is to sound credible and reasonable.” Others contend that this is too tentative. They argue that the party needs to start putting in what one frontbencher calls “the hard yards” required to make Labour look like a potential government. The overarching challenge, the critical goal that defeated both of Mr Starmer’s predecessors, is how to make Labour both a vehicle for transformational change and a party whose promises are believable in the eyes of the electorate. Labour has recovered its morale much more quickly than was anticipated six months ago, but there are probably four years to go between now and the next election. The road up the mountain is steep and winding. It is strewn with huge obstacles and tricky traps and veiled in a lot of mist. Keir Starmer’s first steps have been promising, but the summit is distant and the journey ahead will be a long march.