- Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s top adviser will be in Washington next week
- Deborah Mattinson worked to win back disgruntled former supporters
- READ MORE: Follow all the latest political developments in our live blog
The UK Labour Party won a landslide election victory in July and now Kamala Harris is looking to see what lessons her campaign can learn from across the Atlantic.
Deborah Mattinson, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, is reportedly travelling to the US to brief Harris’ 2024 campaign on the party’s winning strategy.
The Labour Party and the Democratic Party have long sought inspiration from each other, but the direction of travel has generally been from west to east.
But this time, with Starmer kicking out the Conservative Party for the first time in 14 years, Mattinson is expected to travel to Washington, DC, next week.
She had a long career in the Labour Party and was Starmer’s strategy director for three years while he was leader of the opposition, but did not join him at 10 Downing Street.
Deborah Mattinson, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Kier Starmer, will reportedly brief Harris’ 2024 campaign on Labour’s winning strategy.
Instead, Politico revealed that it will pass on lessons to its political allies in the United States.
A former colleague who worked with her on the campaign said she would urge Harris’ campaign to “move away from ‘hope and change'” and maintain a laser focus on winning states.
His expertise lies in winning back disgruntled former supporters.
She literally wrote the book on how Labour lost its working-class strongholds in the North (its Red Wall) to Boris Johnson in 2019. ‘Beyond the Red Wall’ was published in 2020.
And this time he helped develop a strategy focused on winning back “hero voters” – former party supporters who voted for Brexit and switched to the Conservatives.
She arrives shortly after other leading Labor Party minds were in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention.
British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is pictured with Labour MPs elected in a landslide victory on July 4. Now American politicians want a slice of his success.
Mattinson’s message to Harris will be to put aside the good vibes and focus on winning back disaffected supporters in key states.
They included the party’s electoral mastermind, Morgan McSweeney, and Downing Street communications director Matthew Doyle, along with a group of newly elected MPs, according to Politico.
They bucked a different trend across much of Europe, where far-right parties are on the rise: in Italy, Germany, France and beyond.
Matthew McGregor, a former digital director for the Labour Party who also worked for former US president Barack Obama, said it meant the usual direction of travel, with US consultants on both sides finding work in the UK, had been reversed.
“Labor is one of the few Western parties that has recently won, or seems likely to win, from the center-left,” he recently told Politico.
