Keir Starmer has chosen the Tony Blair path – and his party will be rewarded

The Labour Party leader has concluded he cannot both deliver the unity he promised when he ran for the leadership and win power, writes Andrew Grice

The Labour leader gives his speech at conference on Wednesday (Getty)

On the eve of his big speech, Keir Starmer showed his frustration at being constantly compared with two of his predecessors – Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Blair – and declined to say to which of them he was closer. “My job is not to replicate what some past leader has done, my job is to take our Labour Party and change it,” he said.

Yet his 90-minute address to the Labour conference made clear he has chosen the Blair path. He has concluded he cannot both deliver the unity he promised when he ran for the leadership – in other words, keep the Corbyn left happy – and win power. As he told delegates, to “remake this nation” requires Labour to win – for him, “the object of the exercise”.

Repeated heckling from left-wing critics in his audience showed that, despite claiming he had “put our house in order” in Brighton this week, the left is not dead yet; many battles still lie ahead. Starmer came armed with some good put-downs for his enemy within, asking his party whether it wanted “slogans or changing lives”.

Although many voters will not like the image of a divided party, the majority in the hall rallied strongly behind Starmer. After he nodded to Blair’s “education, education, education” mantra without naming Blair, it was highly significant that the biggest cheers came when he praised the genuine “levelling up” achieved by the last Labour government – a clear sign that Labour is finally getting serious about doing what it takes to regain office. His praise drew a line under the electorally disastrous trashing of the party’s brand the left has indulged in since Labour lost power in 2010.

Starmer rightly had some painful home truths for his party: if the Johnson government is so inadequate, he asked, “what does it say about us?” after Labour’s crushing defeat in 2019.

Although close allies insist Starmer is not “Blair mark two”, Blair could have said quite a lot of what Starmer told the conference. Such as the part that went to the heart of the matter: “Too often in the history of this party our dream of the good society falls foul of the belief that we will not run a strong economy. But you don’t get one without the other and under my leadership we are committed to both.”

Starmer presented himself as a serious leader for serious times who would have a serious plan for government – unlike Corbyn but also unlike Boris Johnson, whom he described as “a showman with nothing left to show” now his Brexit trick has been performed. This makes a virtue out of Starmer’s weakness – a solidness that even allies admit can make him look “a bit boring”. He also said Johnson is “not a bad man” – a rebuke to his deputy Angela Rayner for her attack on Johnson and senior Tories as “scum”. 

Starmer finally landed some blows on Johnson for the petrol crisis, saying he was “lost in the woods”, though strangely they have been a long time coming.  Labour’s focus groups have raised Team Starmer’s hopes that Johnson has been “rumbled”, as one ally put it. While voters gave the prime minister the benefit of the doubt over an unavoidable pandemic, they are less forgiving over the current crises on petrol and energy which might have been avoided with better planning and a cost of living crisis made worse by government decisions.

Although the speech was 30 minutes too long, Starmer addressed his identity problem, telling a convincing and at times moving backstory through his family and his work as a lawyer, returning repeatedly to his themes of “work, care, equality, security” – the principles which informed his life, which he described as “the tools of my trade” and in line with patriotic British values. He also tried to make a virtue out of what some supporters see as a flaw, admitting he was “not a career politician”.

The speech was surprisingly light on policy. There were trailed in advance pledges for “the most ambitious school improvement programme ever” and a £1bn-a-year boost for mental health services by the end of a five-year parliament, to which Starmer added a “national mission” for greener homes and lower bills for 19 million homes at a cost of £6bn a year.

Starmer ends the conference in a stronger position than he was at the beginning, though that was not a good place. “He pulled it off with the speech; now he has lift off,” one ally said afterwards.

Despite all the noise in the hall, the audience that matters most will be the public. Team Starmer will be watching the next few opinion polls very closely. So will his left-wing opponents, and mainstream MPs who want him to succeed but have doubts about whether he can. As one shadow cabinet member put it: “We have made some real progress this week but we still have a long, long way to go.”