How can Boris Johnson nullify the threat of Keir Starmer?

Keir Starmer’s bid to present himself as a serious leader for difficult times presents a problem for Boris Johnson, whose popularity continues to fall amid the various crises currently facing the nation. What is he to do? Sean O’Grady considers his options

Johnson has consistently tried to portray Starmer as a ‘continuation Corbyn’ (Getty)

After what was a mostly successful conference for the Labour leader, what now should Boris Johnson do about Sir Keir Starmer? It looks like Starmer is reasonably secure in his post, having engineered a couple of vital rule changes that make it more difficult to challenge him or dislodge his loyalist MPs. The leader of the opposition is here to stay, in other words, and he has derided the prime minister not as a “nasty man” but as a “trivial man”, a one-trick trickster. Now the prime minister will have to find a way of dealing with him. He has a few options.

First, he can pretend that the Labour Party is still led by Jeremy Corbyn, and treat Starmer as his heir. This, indeed, has been the prime minister’s approach for the past 18 months or so. At every opportunity Johnson reminds Starmer and anyone else who’s listening that he, Starmer, loyally served in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, helped to frame and endorsed the 2017 and 2019 Labour election manifestos, and simply sat through the waves of antisemitism and madness that scarred Labour politics in recent years.

In this worldview, Starmer is in fact a kind of continuation Corbyn, a secret agent who publicly renounces Corbynism but is just as set on using his high tax, high borrowing, high spending programme and enthusiasm for nationalisation. As the struggles at Labour conference highlight, this is not an entirely convincing case. Perhaps it would be better for Johnson not to exaggerate for comic effect, as he tends to, but just stick to attacking the various tax hikes and socialistic measures Starmer has in fact endorsed. It would sound a bit more realistic.

Johnson could also return to Brexit. It was Starmer, after all, who was a leading advocate of a people’s vote on Johnson’s Brexit deal, the so-called second referendum. Starmer would be plausibly caricatured as a stubborn remoaner who would like nothing more than to reverse Brexit, with or without the permission of the British people in a referendum. Starmer talks about “making Brexit work”, but the prime minister can legitimately ask what that means – rejoining the single market? Customs union? EU? Joining the euro?

Of course the fact that Johnson and Lord (David) Frost are busily engaged in trying to renegotiate their own deal, and the manifest shortcomings of Brexit, do tend to blunt this line of attack, but it might shore up the more Brexity part of the Tory vote.

In the same vein, Starmer can be made a cultural target, and portrayed as a mad woke warrior. It may seem ridiculous, but there are people outraged that Starmer has, however jokingly, said he’d like to see a female James Bond. The uncomfortable truth is that Johnson tends to appeal to the more socially conservative elements in society (despite his own libertine ways), while Starmer appears the epitome of the metropolitan liberal elite, and a do-gooding soft-on-criminals lawyer to boot. Johnson has used this line before, about Starmer’s “Islington” tendencies, despite Johnson having his former marital home in the borough. Starmer’s (or Labour’s) attitudes towards refugees, the BBC, a new royal yacht, nuclear weapons, taking the knee… all have been and will be weaponised.

Starmer delivers his keynote address on Wednesday (Getty)

The union is also a weak point for Starmer, having once conceded the case for a second referendum on Scottish independence. Ed Miliband and Corbyn were also portrayed as being in the SNP’s pocket in the case of a hung parliament, and Starmer will no doubt remove the same treatment, despite the pro-union noises he tries to make and his attempts to escape his previous commitment to another vote on independence. It’s less of a personal attack on Starmer, and many in England and Wales might not be moved by it, but, again there will be a “patriotic” constituency for whom it will be powerful.

Another method of dealing with a patently moderate or right-wing Labour leader is to praise the leader but say that they are just a respectable front, a mask behind whom we can’t see the assorted revolutionary Trots and Stalinist union barons behind it. It is a time-honoured tactic. It was the attack that had to be adopted when Hugh Gaitskell, Jim Callaghan and Tony Blair ran the Labour Party, and will no doubt be deployed again, especially as the election approaches: Starmer’s alright, but his party is full of nutters who’ll push him around.

Or Johnson can try the most hurtful tactic of all, and just ignore Starmer. That does solve the problem, sort of, at least until the next election campaign. Or Johnson refuses to acknowledge Starmer as an equal, which might serve to diminish Starmer, or at least demoralise him. Johnson doesn’t need to build Starmer up right now, even inadvertently.

It’s also worth mentioning that whatever Johnson decides to say about Starmer, his allies in the press and social media will fill the vacuum with all manner of lies, half-truths and twisted facts, such as the idea that Starmer, as director of public prosecutions, let Jimmy Savile off, or that his address at the Labour conference was all heckling and no speech. In that respect, Starmer will get the very same treatment as every single Labour leader before him, and the script pretty much writes itself.