Keir Starmer being miserable and offering to ‘sweat blood’ is not going to get voters

The Labour leader had an opportunity to tell people that he is determined to change the party, and he blew it, writes John Rentoul

Sir Keir Starmer, not happy (BBC News)

Why did he say that? One seasoned observer of politics asked me why Keir Starmer said he would be “sweating blood” to earn the trust of the British people. He had been asked, by Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC political editor, what was the most important thing he had heard while talking to former Labour voters in Blackpool on Thursday.

It was an open question. He could have said anything he wanted about how he hoped to win them back – and he chose to describe the pain and difficulty of his own struggle rather than anything that would actually give other people a reason to vote for him.

You can see what he is trying to do. He needs to tell the voters that he understands why they didn’t vote Labour last time and that he is determined to change the party. It is a message directed towards his own supporters as much as it is to floating voters.

But a lot of the “change” message is content-free, and it seems that the intensity and sincerity of the effort is offered as a substitute for a programme for which people might actually vote. As a result, all a lot of voters hear is that the party accepts that no normal person would have voted for it last time. No wonder one anonymous party aide said to Esther Webber of Politico: “I wish we’d talk more about what we’re going to do and less about how sh*t we are.”

Yet when Starmer tried to talk to Blackpool voters about Labour’s policies, he didn’t have much luck either. A jobs guarantee for under-25s, he said. “Lots of under-25s don’t want to work,” came the reply. They are quite happy to be paid to sit around. A recovery fund for schools got a slightly warmer response, but one of the group asked: if the government can’t pay for it, how are you going to?

The third point of Starmer’s three-point plan was to “buy, make and sell more in Britain”, a new slogan that he tried out tentatively – “You’d be in favour of it, I take it?” The older man who had told him he was “on a death spiral” replied: “I’d be in favour of it, but again, good luck with that one.”

It is an odd slogan, implying a more self-sufficient British economy, less connected to the world. One of the voters immediately saw the connection with Brexit, thinking it made sense to “buy British” especially “now that we’ve left Europe”. But it is still strange, because it looks like an attempt to put Labour on the isolationist side of public opinion while the leaders of Brexit opinion try to portray leaving the EU as a chance for “Global Britain” to engage more with the wider world, as a buccaneering trading nation.

Starmer explicitly argued to these Blackpool voters that Britain should avoid importing things, even if they came at a “slightly cheaper price”, for the sake of creating “a skilled job here in a community that needs it”. That might be a popular message, but the crashing of gears from a party that said Brexit made us poorer by putting up barriers to trade is painful to the ears.

There was one bearer of good news in Starmer’s Blackpool posse: a woman who thought he didn’t have any personality or charisma but was happy to report that, face to face, he did. I can confirm that there is a gap between TV Starmer and IRL Starmer. In real life, the Labour leader is cheerful, open, teasingly humorous, at ease with himself. Put a camera in front of him and he seems anxious, earnest and uncomfortable.

Unfortunately for him, even when coronavirus restrictions are lifted, most voters are going to know about him through a screen. A screen on which he is generally going to look miserable, offering to “sweat blood” and outlining serious policies that may or may not make sense but that sound – I’m sorry, what were you saying?

And he is up against a prime minister who can put on a serious face for a few minutes every now and again but who looks as if he would be horrified to be asked to make any kind of sacrifice to appeal to the voters. Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” speech yesterday was as vacuous and contradictory as anything Starmer could come up with, but it was a version of that hopey-changey thing: many people were entertained by it, and he looked as if he was enjoying himself.

We saw a hint of how politics might be if the tables were turned in Prime Minister’s Questions this week, when for once Starmer seemed relaxed and cheerful while Johnson was hunched and unhappy.

Whenever he is out of Westminster, however, talking to people (even if they are an off-screen audience of workers in a Coventry battery factory), Johnson looks as if he is having the time of his life, evangelising for the great green future that is just around the corner.

It’s all stuff and nonsense, but people would rather have that than Starmer coming to tell you that the country is broken, and that the Labour Party is terrible but that it promises to sweat blood to get better.