Hero voters: who should Labour target? with Chris Curtis MP & Deborah Mattinson
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 6 April 2026
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Labour won the 2024 general election in part by focusing on ‘hero voters’ – so called because they may have voted Labour in the past but felt the party had abandoned them. Now they risk losing them again – so how does Labour maintain their support?
Chris Curtis, Labour MP for Milton Keynes North and former pollster, and Deborah Mattinson, Labour peer and polling guru, join Tim Shipman to talk about how to appeal to this set of voters. Research suggests that voters from this group that are socially liberal are switching to the Greens, while the socially conservative voters are switching to Reform. What binds both groups though is a sense of economic insecurity, and both Chris and Deborah talk how Labour can build a strategy around appealing to their sense of fairness. Can you separate economic insecurity from values? How does immigration fit into the equation? And how broad a coalition can you build before it becomes unsustainable?
Plus: in 2026, what does it mean to be ‘working class’?
Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectators' Daily Politics podcast. I am Tim Shipman, the politicaliser, and I'm delighted today to be joined by two of the best number-crunching brains in the Labour Party who are going to talk about how Labour won the election and what they might do now to get back some of the voters they've lost since. |
| 0:22.8 | With me today is Labour MP Chris Curtis, former pollster, who's written some interesting stuff recently, |
| 0:28.6 | and Deborah Matinson, who I will refrain from calling a veteran pollster. |
| 0:33.5 | Thank you. |
| 0:35.0 | But who has been at the cutting edge of Labour thought on numbers and messaging for longer |
| 0:41.4 | than she or I would prefer to recall. |
| 0:44.5 | Chris, we'll start with you because you've just written a substack. |
| 0:47.9 | Deborah, you came up, I think, with the notion of hero voters. |
| 0:52.1 | The great success of Keir Starrma's election win in 2024 |
| 0:57.1 | was the poaching of voters from the Conservative Party |
| 1:02.6 | and from the sort of non-voting fraternity, |
| 1:05.0 | people who had knocked back them in 2019, |
| 1:07.0 | flocked in decent size numbers in 2024. |
| 1:10.9 | Chris, you've just written this subststack saying that actually people have misunderstood a little bit |
| 1:16.2 | who those voters were and what they're about. |
| 1:18.2 | And because they've misunderstood that, the debate within the Labour Party now about where to lean |
| 1:24.1 | and which voters to try and get back has become a little bit distorted. Just take us |
| 1:29.1 | through your argument. So it's not so much that they've misunderstood it. It's that they've only |
| 1:35.0 | focused on one part of it. So a lot of politics in recent years has been focusing on this idea |
| 1:41.6 | that we've shifted away from class-based voting to values-based voting. |
| 1:46.9 | And to a certain extent that has happened. |
| 1:49.3 | The extra layer I'm trying to add on to that is actually, I think, what we've moved away from is values as part of it, |
... |
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