Keir Starmer was going to quit as a failure three years ago – now he is on course for No 10

The Tories’ implosion is the biggest reason for that transformation, writes John Rentoul – but what does that mean for Labour’s prospects in power?

Nothing Keir Starmer has done has had much effect compared with the damage the Conservatives have inflicted on themselves (PA)

That a politician thought about resigning but decided not to is perhaps not the most important news story. But it is one of the episodes in Tom Baldwin’s biography of Keir Starmer that attracted attention.

After the Hartlepool by-election in May 2021, when the government gained the seat from the opposition, “Keir kept saying that he felt he would have to go, that the result showed the party was going backwards and he saw it as a personal rejection,” Baldwin quotes an aide as saying.

It was the low point of Starmer’s leadership, as Labour trailed the Tories by 10 points in the national opinion polls. Labour’s support, which had risen when he became leader a year earlier, fell back to where it had been under Jeremy Corbyn in the 2019 election. Boris Johnson was relatively popular, buoyed by the success of the coronavirus vaccine. Local Tories celebrated the by-election win by inflating a large model of the prime minister outside the count.

That by-election now seems to belong to another world. In less than three years, British politics has been transformed. Starmer seems unassailable. It would take something quite out of the ordinary to prevent a Labour government from taking office by the end of the year.

How on earth did that happen, and what does it tell us about what sort of prime minister Starmer might be? Part of Labour’s recovery is certainly down to Starmer himself. He has become a better communicator, more relaxed and confident. He has taken a lot of the right decisions. Even before Hartlepool, he had made sure that Anas Sarwar replaced Richard Leonard as leader of the Scottish Labour Party, which allowed Labour to take fuller advantage when the Scottish National Party’s troubles arrived in a police car.

Starmer has ruthlessly ditched policy baggage. Anything that might put people off voting Labour has been disowned. He has ignored accusations of flip-flopping from the Conservatives, and from those Labour members who thought they were voting for Corbynism without Corbyn in the leadership election. He has also ignored Labour’s wets, the political obsessives who complain that he doesn’t stand for anything and that there is no difference between Labour and the Tories.

By reassuring undecided voters that it is safe to vote Labour, he has helped lift his party out of a nosedive that could have turned into a tailspin. But the one decision that has made a positive difference since Hartlepool is the appointment of Rachel Reeves as shadow chancellor. Her success in presenting herself as the iron-clad defender of fiscal responsibility is the rock on which Labour’s recovery has been built.

The shadow cabinet reshuffle after the Hartlepool by-election attracted attention at the time because of Starmer’s unsuccessful attempt to demote Angela Rayner, but its lasting significance was the elevation of Reeves. She has given Labour the economic credibility it needs.

Even so, nothing that Starmer has done has had much effect compared with the damage that the Conservatives have inflicted on themselves. The slide started with the revelations about lockdown parties in Downing Street that filtered out at the end of 2021. The damage was doubled by the disastrous premiership of Liz Truss, and nothing that Rishi Sunak has done since has succeeded in clawing back lost ground.

We can give Starmer some credit for not having made a mess of this opportunity, even as we compare him regretfully with Tony Blair, who made so much more of the similar opportunity afforded to him by the Major government. Oppositions don’t usually win elections, but sometimes they make it look as if they have taken control of events.

The implication of Starmer being the mere beneficiary of Tory disarray is that he has not earned the right to govern and will have to work to do so in office. It is true that Blair travelled light on policy, and had virtually no idea what to do with power once he acquired it. But he had outstanding communication skills, a big idea of modernisation, and such a benign economic inheritance that the Labour government posted a budget surplus in its third year.

Starmer has just abandoned his one big idea – the green energy revolution – and will inherit the public finances in a ruinous state if he wins.

He has got the basics right, including the right person as shadow chancellor, but the main reason he is winning is that the Conservatives have imploded. This means that, if there is a Labour government, it is likely to struggle, quite soon after winning, to maintain momentum. The other implication is that Reeves will be an immensely powerful chancellor.

But if Starmer had been told, as he contemplated the “personal rejection” of the Hartlepool by-election and said “I could happily work in the bookshop or something,” that he would be on the threshold of power three years later, I think he would have seized that difficult inheritance with both hands.