The UK Labour Party is reaching out to Conservative donors for support, as opposition leader Keir Starmer makes a play for City of London elite who may have cooled on the ruling party.
Rachel Reeves, Starmer’s would-be chancellor of the exchequer, has sent personal letters to several Tory financial backers in recent weeks inviting them to one-on-one breakfast meetings, according to people familiar with the correspondence. The letter casts Labour as the only fiscally responsible party with a credible plan for growth, according to one of the people.
One Tory donor who has given thousands of pounds to the Conservatives confirmed receiving the letter and expressed openness to meeting Reeves, a former Bank of England economist. Another Tory donor said they had already met with Labour officials recently after accepting an invitation. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because the communications were private.
Labour has been courting the British business community in a campaign that has drawn comparisons to former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s “prawn cocktail offensive” ahead of his successful landslide election a quarter-century ago. In recent months, Starmer and Reeves have glad-handed at Davos and used every opportunity to cast themselves as more pro-growth than Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker with a master of business administration degree from Stanford University.
A Labour official confirmed the party was in contact with what they described as a wide range of businesses, including figures who have been associated with the Tories in the past.
That high-profile Tory donors would even entertain meeting top Labour officials shows how the tables have turned between the UK’s main parties in recent years. Since taking over the leadership from Jeremy Corbyn in the wake of a disastrous performance in the 2019 general election, Starmer has expelled his left-wing predecessor and scrapped his program of mass nationalization of privatized industries.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, are struggling to recover from a period of turmoil in which they ditched two leaders in a year, both of whom damaged the Tories’ historic reputation as the party of business. Boris Johnson famously dismissed corporate Britain with an expletive: “f*** business,” while his successor Liz Truss roiled the markets with a huge package of unfunded tax rises during her disastrous 7-week term in office.
The ruling party’s reputation with the electorate has also suffered, and the Tories have trailed Labour by a double-digit margin in national polls for months.
All of that has bolstered confidence within Labour that influential business voices are turning to them. Starmer launched an outreach operation to woo donors from the corporate world last year as he attempted to distance himself from Corbyn’s approach. In one meeting, Labour’s Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury Pat McFadden joked to City figures that they could trust him because he was sacked by Corbyn in 2016, according to a person present.
Britain’s political parties are looking to raise money and land endorsements before a likely election campaign next year, with the country due to go to the polls by January 2025 at the latest.
Securing the defection of big-name Conservative donors would be seen as a coup for Labour. Two former Tory donors, Kasim Kutay, the chief executive officer of life-sciences investor Novo Holdings, and Gareth Quarry, a multimillionaire tycoon, switched allegiance to Labour in 2022.
The Conservative Party received £12.3 million ($16.1 million) of donations in the first three months of 2023, including £5 million from Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Mansour, according to figures published by the Electoral Commission in June. This was a marked improvement from the party after its donations sank to their lowest in two years at the end of 2022. Labour reported £5.9 million of donations in the first quarter of the year.
--With assistance from Leonora Campbell.
