O
ne evening last week I attended a focus group in Stevenage, the Hertfordshire bellwether constituency that Sir Keir Starmer hopes to win in the next general election. It was organised by Labour Together, a well-funded strategy group linked to Starmer’s most influential aide, Morgan McSweeney, and the theme was “security”.
Since the seat was created in 1983, the year of Margaret Thatcher’s landslide election victory in the long aftermath of the Falklands conflict, the MP for Stevenage has always represented the governing party. In 1997 it was won by Barbara Follett, an ally of Tony Blair and the wife of the novelist Ken Follett, and it retains symbolic value for Labour.
Stevenage was one of the new towns created after the war by the reforming
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