The five groups Labour have to win, keep or not scare

Labour activists are not the same as Labour voters. Labour voters are not the same as Labour considerers. And what about those who will never vote for us?

Winning elections is a tricky beast. There are so many balls in the air and so many things that can go wrong. Just ask Theresa May - or Neil Kinnock.

As Labour go into the last 18 months or so of the long campaign for the next election they will have a lot of siren voices calling for them to do a lot of different things. I will undoubtedly be one of them (the one they should listen to obviously).

But as always in politics, we make the mistake of talking about what parties should do whereas the actual conversation has to be about what - and there whom - they should prioritise.

For me, there are five groups that are going to help or hinder Labour from success in the next election. And they are all important. But there are tensions between these groups and as such, there will have to be choices made about which win out when those tensions are at play.

The groups I have identified are these:

• Labour Activists

• Loyal Labour Voters

• Labour Considerers - Brexit flavour

• Labour Considerers - Anti-Boris flavour

• Anti-Labour Formerly-Tory Voters

So let’s consider these groups one by one. Break them down into their different parts and think about where they can and should sit on any list of priorities. Because all of them matter, there should be thought put into how we find ways of appealing across the groups. But these will have downsides with other groups. So they have to be understood, ruthlessly, in terms of prioritisation.