Sir Keir Starmer was never supposed to win the next election. The Labour leader himself may have thought differently — you do not get to the top of politics without an immense sense of destiny — but even close allies doubted it was possible. However low one’s opinion of Boris Johnson, few predicted how rapidly his government would unravel.
Suddenly, Starmer faces the terrifying prospect of victory. Instead of having a decade to rescue his party from the catastrophe of Corbynism, Starmer must now be Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Tony Blair combined; their 14-year trek from the unelectable left to the political mainstream must be squeezed into a single parliament. And yet this novice leader, who took over just five years after entering parliament, seems on course to complete the mission.
For all that, Starmer marks his third anniversary as leader knowing doubts about him are Labour’s major obstacle to victory. Opinion polls suggest that voters are susceptible to the Tory criticism that he is slippery.
These doubts are fortified by his record. He resigned from Jeremy Corbyn’s front bench in protest at his leadership, only to return in an enhanced role at the same time as his current close shadow cabinet allies refused to serve. Other MPs left the party while he campaigned to make Corbyn prime minister then, during the contest to succeed him, pledged to stick with his predecessor’s core policies — only to ditch them and ban Corbyn from standing again as a Labour candidate.
To some, he remains contaminated by collaboration. Against this is the unarguable utilitarian case: a Corbyn-refusenik could not have won the leadership. By staying on the front bench, Starmer was able to play the unifier and then start salvaging the party. No one doubts his ruthlessness; many justifiably wonder about his true beliefs.
There are other instances. Having initially argued that Labour had to accept the Brexit vote, he led the fight for a second referendum. Now he promises only incremental reforms to the Brexit deal.
His peregrinations on social issues, from trans rights to immigration, have been similarly and painfully visible. Starmer’s actions suggest a man who blithely took the prevailing line and who now, suddenly charged with setting the course, is learning on the job. But where Blair, clear in his own mind, triangulated between the electorate and the party, Starmer is still triangulating with himself.
Again, there’s a case for the defence. The job of parties is to win elections. They operate in a market and cannot simply ignore consumer sentiment. But voters want to know that a leader shares their values. They like that Starmer is not Corbyn. Beyond that, they are unclear.
Starmer asks that people trust his three-stage process. The first two, fix the party and expose Tory failings, are going well even if the government can claim most of the credit for the latter. But on the third — make the positive case for Labour — even frontbenchers lament a lack of definition. The challenge is made harder by a weak economy. But the void kills the message.
He is also determined to avoid the wrong bold vision. One recent shadow cabinet meeting was characterised as a gentle effort by those close to Ed Miliband to adopt the “approach which worked so well for him in 2015”.
The problem has now been emphasised by detailed voter research by the sympathetic Labour Together think-tank, which suggests the strategy has been overly aimed at the wrong target. Labour has tried to soothe the doubts of socially conservative, former Labour voters in the Midlands and north whom the research calls the “patriotic left”. This was a necessary step.
But now, Labour Together argues, the key target is a voter it calls “Stevenage woman”: a working mother, concerned about the cost of living, who likes Rishi Sunak but is disillusioned with his party. The key point about this cohort is that they are cynical and disengaged from politics. When they do pay attention they need to hear Labour’s solutions, not just criticisms.
The issue for Labour is not lack of policy, but clarity of signal. Trust is built by a coherent, easy-to-grasp narrative that projects how the party might start to fix the nation’s problems along with a sense of Starmer’s core values and whose interests he will prioritise. Winning policies, soundbites and slogans must spring from those strategic principles. The vagueness around how Labour would improve or fund key public services fosters the hunch that it either has no answers, or none it wishes to share.
In truth, the Tories have probably already gifted Labour the election, so Starmer may be right to focus on eliminating negatives. But if he cannot answer voters’ questions, his opponents will answer them for him — at the very least, this could limit any victory.
Since everyone inside Labour recognises this problem, there are three possible explanations. The first is that Starmer is as shifty as his opponents suggest. The second is that he knows what he is doing and maybe it’s time for allies to trust the process.
There is a third, not entirely comforting explanation. It is that Starmer’s ideological trajectory points in the right direction, but he looks like a man whose core values are unclear because, three years into what ought to have been a 10-year process, he is still working them out for himself.