Why a victory for Sir Keir Starmer is on the cards for 2024

Labour has at last produced a detailed and thorough analysis of why it lost the 2019 general election, confirming what we already knew. It was Corbyn; it was Brexit; it was the manifesto; it was Vote Leave's mobilisation of two million voters who don't normally vote. But Labour remains as baffled by the scale of its defeat, as the Conservatives are by the scale of their victory. The 2017 election, in which Labour made substantial gains, seemed to suggest there was a market in Britain for radical policies, so the 2019 offer was more radical still. Result – disaster.

The 2017 election suggested that the style and personality of Jeremy Corbyn could attract voters, whereas two years later it comprehensively repelled them. Disaster again. The polls said that more people thought Britain should remain in the EU than leave it, but it was Leave that won the day for the Tories. Boris Johnson was one of the most unpopular leaders of the Conservative Party ever to lead it into a general election, yet he is now a virtually untouchable prime minister with a majority of 80. He is presiding over an unprecedented administrative catastrophe which has cost tens of thousands of unnecessarily lost lives in the coronavirus pandemic, yet he is still ahead in the polls. Obviously the laws of politics have been suspended, and two and two no longer make four.

In that spirit, therefore, I hereby predict that Sir Keir Starmer will lead Labour to an impressive victory in 2024. The swing he needs to do so is actually less than Tony Blair's swing to Labour in 1997. Consider: Brexit will be well out of the way; Corbyn has gone, vanquished, and been replaced by a much more plausible prime minister-in-waiting. Labour's ambitions for reform have been scaled down; Labour's front bench is gradually emerging as sensible and trustworthy, unlike its predecessor.

But crucially and above all, the coronavirus has shot the Tories' fox. When it comes to public spending, the Government has accepted the need for intervention in the economy, and the need for a Big State when the going gets tough. Public spending, government intervention and a Big State are in anybody's book left wing policies. Even the free marketeers have embraced social justice. Instead of ideology, the Tories are driven by polling data and focus groups, beloved of Boris Johnson's policy guru Dominic Cummings.

To win, Labour needs one good idea. They don't need class war, or envy of the rich; they don't even need equality as a mantra. These are both abstractions and distractions. All they need is a war on poverty – tangible poverty, the sort people understand, the poverty where children go to bed hungry, and parents – mothers, in fact –  skip meals to put food on plates. The poverty that keeps you awake at night, fearful of the knock on the door when the rent is due or the final eviction extension granted by the court expires and last resort council-appointed bed and breakfast accommodation beckons as your only option, even in cramped rooms damp with mould.

Poverty means fragility, vulnerability, fear and stress. In fact it means all that Manchester United footballer Marcus Rashford referred to when he pleaded with the government to continue to provide free meals for children during the school holidays. It stopped them going hungry. And there is no argument in politics as potent as a hungry child.

There is more to the elimination of poverty, of course, than just hunger. There is the grinding hopelessness, with poor schooling leading to dead-end jobs with no security, no satisfaction or sense of achievement. Work is no longer, if it ever was, the route out of poverty. Low wages are the greatest injustice of our age. I don't think Labour needs to come up with fine theories about why people are poor. It is simply they do not earn enough to live on. And living means more than existing; it means, to be technical, integral human development, the prospect of bettering oneself, becoming who one is meant to be. Like Marcus Rashford, in fact. And being able to feed one's children.