Skip to main content
Gifts from The Morning Star
Inside Corbyn’s game-changing election campaign
Former deputy director of strategy for Labour STEVE HOWELL talks to the Star about how the party created a narrative around Corbyn to propel its election campaign forward
Former deputy director of strategy for Labour Steve Howell

APPOINTED the deputy director of strategy and communications in the Labour leadership team in February 2017, Steve Howell had an insider’s view of the most extraordinary general election of recent times.

Cardiff-based Howell was the chief executive of Freshwater, a communications consultancy he founded in 1997, when he got the call from his old friend Seumas Milne, Jeremy Corbyn’s director for communications and strategy.

“Politics is not a spectator sport,” he recounts Milne telling him in his new book Game Changer: Eight Weeks That Transformed British Politics.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
More from this author
IS albums
Album reviews / 6 October 2025
6 October 2025

New releases from Steady Habits, Jeff Tweedy, and Tom Skinner

ai con
Books / 2 October 2025
2 October 2025

IAN SINCLAIR welcomes a lucid critique of a technology that reproduces and enables oppression, power, and environmental devastation

IS
Album reviews / 22 September 2025
22 September 2025

Reviews of new releases by Wednesday, Suede, and Nation of Language

IS 2
Album reviews / 9 September 2025
9 September 2025

Reviews of new releases by Jens Lekman, Big Thief, and Christian McBride Big Band

Similar stories
Tower of Babel, 1982
Culture / 10 April 2025
10 April 2025
This is poetry in paint, spectacular but never spectacle for its own sake, writes JAN WOOLF
MASTERMIND; (L) Jon Pertwee as Dr Who in Invasion of the Din
Books / 13 March 2025
13 March 2025
JOHN GREEN surveys the remarkable career of screenwriter Malcolm Hulke and the essential part played by his membership of the Communist Party
RESILIENCE: (Right) Stand Up To Racism protest on October 26
Features / 31 December 2024
31 December 2024
The Morning Star sorts the good eggs from the rotten scoundrels of the year
Features / 11 December 2024
11 December 2024
LOUISE RAW speaks to Long Covid sufferer Sam Williams and others who feel let down by a state that ignores their debilitating illness