Boris Johnson can rest assured. The minister for London, Tessa Jowell, is not about to unleash the kind of class war on the capital’s new mayor to which Labour has just treated the citizens of Crewe and Nantwich. ‘I don’t think anybody is impressed by “toff talk”. We need to be both more subtle and also recognise that the world has changed. This is an old-fashioned way, for our young voters, for people to talk,’ she argues.

Jowell is thus dismissive of any suggestion that the London party could pick up some tips from the tactics employed against Crewe Tory candidate Edward Timpson: ‘Although people may feel that if you’ve been to one of the schools of extraordinary elite and privilege, like Eton, you may not quite be of the world that everybody else is … people don’t see this as something that they hold that person responsible for. I don’t think that “toff talk” and “toff attacks” are the way that we should be directing our attack. And I also really don’t think that people like personal attacks.’

Jowell’s apparent reticence to go for the Tory jugular may surprise some. After all, few witnessed the scale of Labour’s May Day massacre as close up as the London minister. As coordinator of the party’s campaign in the capital, it was Jowell who grimly conceded, several hours before the result was officially declared, that Ken Livingstone had indeed lost his bid for re-election. And she is hardly oblivious to the magnitude of the party’s defeat: ‘The results were hideous; they were very, very bad results,’ she readily acknowledges.

But the London minister’s attitude is more a reflection of the fact that she would rather Labour plays the ball than the man: ‘When, as the Tories have done, they give us the abundance of grounds to attack on policy, lack of substance, lack of values, failure to recognise the pressures on modern families, we don’t need to resort to personal attacks.’ Instead, she urges Labour to ‘intensify the attack and the policy debate over the next few months’. The focus should be on the ‘issues that really matter to people: migration and immigration, access to GP services and healthcare, really good local schools and safety; addressing the real fear of crime that people have’.

In the London campaign, Jowell argues, ‘nothing was of greater concern than crime and the fear of crime’. And, while some dismiss such fears as disproportionate, the London minister warns the party against such an attitude. Referring to the recent spate of gun and knife crime in the capital, she argues: ‘Among a lot of young people – particularly in my part of Lambeth – a lot of them know people who have been murdered or injured, so it’s real to their everyday lives.’

There is a wider lesson for Labour here, suggests Jowell: ‘We have to engage in conversation with people on terms that recognise their reality and experience. There is no point trying to trade government statistics with people on the doorstep, insisting that because the government’s statistics say “x”, the person’s belief that “y” is the case is somehow invalid. There’s great peril … in allowing that gap between insistence and perception and experience to open too widely.’

Nonetheless, Jowell believes that there is some good news for Labour from the London campaign. Boosted by a high turnout, the party fared better in London than elsewhere in the country: while Labour trailed by 20 per cent nationally, Livingstone was only six points behind Johnson on first preferences in the mayoral vote and the party’s candidates for the Greater London Assembly ran nine per cent behind the Tories.

But, the minister for London continues, ‘You can pick over the optimistic conclusions from the London campaign, but in politics you win or lose and Ken lost.’ She is willing to accept – and believes the former mayor does, too – that ‘there was a perception that Ken did more, and was more concerned about, people in inner London than in outer London’, but, Jowell argues, this was not ‘a wholly fair judgement’.

Nonetheless, this perception cost Livingstone his job: ‘What lost it for us, in terms of where the votes came from, was the incredibly high vote for Boris Johnson out in the suburbs: in Bromley, Bexley and south-west London.’ She also wishes the campaign had been kicked off earlier: ‘My involvement was for about two months before the campaign … I think, in retrospect, I’d like to have been in there, working with Ken and his team and the London Labour party, about last September.’

The former mayor was, however, simply the most high-profile of the several hundred casualties Labour suffered in this year’s elections. For Jowell the party’s losses were, in part, a reflection of the fact that ‘paradoxically after 10 years of Labour government, I think that people feel unduly secure about voting for the Tories. It’s not a weird thing to do anymore.’

But has the electoral tide turned, leaving Labour to be washed out to sea in two year’s time? Jowell thinks not: ‘I do not believe that people have given up on Labour. I believe the greatest risk is that Labour and the Labour party give up on government.’ She is thus dismissive of the notion that the elections signalled ‘the death of New Labour’. ‘New Labour is the political idea that still commands the greatest consensus in this country,’ the minister suggests.

And the Tories know it, she claims: ‘They’re trying to do New Labour-lite. In other words [unlike New Labour], no underpinning of values, no commitment, no outrage at the effect of inequality, no sense that opportunity and fairness have to be created rather than are simply givens in our society. So what we will see are the creaming-off of bits of policy here and there, but in a sense they are like plants without the capacity to root. And that’s why, and the Tories themselves will concede this, they should be doing an awful lot better.’

Like her cabinet colleague Hazel Blears, Jowell believes the government can begin to overcome its current woes by becoming ‘an activist government’, with ministers getting out of Whitehall more often so that they can ‘spend time every week talking to people’. Then, she suggests, ‘the national headlines matter less and focus groups matter less because every single member of the government would have this security of being grounded in the views and experience of real people’.

She likens being a member of the government to ‘sitting in a room where the volume of the radio is turned up absolutely full pitch, everything is screaming at you’. Outside the so-called Westminster bubble, by contrast, ‘You go and walk down a street, knock on doors or talk to people at a school gate and the volume’s turned down. Some of the concerns are the same, but people are more realistic’. And it is in the ‘wisdom and experience, the optimism, ambition and generosity of people, but also their fears’ that Jowell sees Labour’s potential salvation and its biggest challenge: ‘making sure that government really does work for people and that we move beyond these platitudes that just drip off people because they have no meaning for them’.