To fulfil his destiny as the ‘heir to Blair’, Keir Starmer must discover a radical edge

Editorial: In ditching out-of-date policies that no longer serve his cause, the Labour leader has demonstrated a pragmatism that helped his predecessor win three elections. Now we must hope he will grow in office into a less cautious and more charismatic figure

16 May 2024 (Dave Brown)

Heir to Blair” is a title to which many politicians have laid claim, not always with conspicuous success; but even if it is unspoken, it is clear that Sir Keir Starmer is making a rather more credible attempt to emulate Sir Tony Blair’s achievements than most of the imitators down the years.

Sir Keir’s latest staging post in what he hopes will be a decade of power is some key pledges for the initial stages of that administration – six “missions” and five “first steps”, all of them, no doubt, forged in the white-hot crucible of the marginal-seat focus group. They are fairly familiar to anyone paying much attention, and all are to be put on a New Labour-style pledge card.

They are unexceptionable, if not laudable – just like the ones in the Blair era. Few voters will want to quibble with shorter NHS waiting lists, recruiting 6,500 teachers, and more neighbourhood police officers to deal with anti-social behaviour. The two new bodies to be set up almost immediately after a Labour election win – Great British Energy and the Border Security Command – may well do some good, and certainly not any harm.

Sir Keir has demonstrated that, like his pragmatic predecessor, he is happy to ditch policies that have gone out of date, just as he has personalities that no longer serve the cause. The manifesto Sir Keir campaigned on for the leadership has been abandoned, just as Blair reneged on his pledge when he was running for the same job back in 1994, that the old Clause IV commitment to nationalisation would stay. In both cases, the “betrayal” hasn’t troubled the conscience of the British floating voter.

Yet it is also wrong to try and portray Sir Keir as some sort of socialist now masquerading as a centrist. Again, like Blair before him, this leader of the opposition has always (or at least since he grew up) been a fairly conventional social democrat. Rishi Sunak spends a portion of every Prime Minister’s Questions reminding people that Sir Keir wanted Jeremy Corbyn to be prime minister but everyone knows Starmer’s heart was never in that – just as they didn’t seriously believe that Tony Blair ever wanted Michael Foot to be PM, or had any confidence that Neil Kinnock would be able to overcome the doubts of the electorate.

The then Mr Kinnock was a genuine man of the left who found himself, mostly for electoral purposes, shedding principles and crabbing towards the right. He rarely seemed comfortable doing so. Sir Keir, modest a man as he is, can scarcely conceal his joy at being the nation’s number one centrist dad. In any case, Labour is taking a calculated risk in personalising the coming presidential-style campaign, placing Sir Keir’s face at the head of it. He may not be spectacularly popular yet but the voters rate him higher than Sunak.

As New Labour was in its day, what Sir Keir habitually calls his “changed Labour” party is meticulous about presentation, ruthless about personalities and policy, and just a little cheesy in its gimmickry – pledge cards and a launch in Essex are “very 1990s”. Everything is subordinated to the same transcendent aim and duty: winning their first general election since 2005.

The consequences for the Labour Party of a further defeat at this stage are too gruesome to contemplate. That, as well as Sir Keir’s firm leadership style, has helped maintain discipline. Success, too, in record-breaking by-elections and in local and mayoral contests has also bred confidence.

Obviously, a sizeable chunk of the population is determined to get the Tories out, voting tactically along the way. Sunak and his predecessors have largely been the authors of their own misfortune. But there is nothing inevitable about voters turning to Labour in the numbers that they have, rather than registering a protest vote with some convenient minor party, as tended to happen when they dispatched the Tories in 1964 and 1974. Indeed, Sir Keir may exceed the share of the vote won by Blair in 1997 – and, for that matter, Corbyn, in his spirited effort in 2017.

They say that the British public doesn’t “love” Sir Keir; it’s true, but the extent to which they were impressed or smitten by Blair before his landslide victory and subsequent elevation to the status of political Sun King has been forgotten. Before his great hat-trick of electoral wins and dominance of the scene, there wasn’t that much “love” for New Labour, albeit his personal ratings were always healthy. Perhaps, if he has the same degree of success enjoyed as Blair (at least until the Iraq war distorted his legacy), Starmer will also grow in office and become a more charismatic figure. Power can do that to people – most spectacularly in the case of Margaret Thatcher.

Yet there is something in the Labour leadership’s approach to securing power that inevitably calls to mind the famous words of Sir Michael Caine in The Italian Job: “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!” It is possible, in other words, he may be overdoing the drive for “electability”, even to the extent of reversing some populist policies.

We have, for example, witnessed successive emasculations of the promise to restore child benefits; the scheme to immediately nationalise the railways, water supply and Royal Mail; the Green Prosperity Plan; abolition of the House of Lords; the New Deal for Workers; and, apparently, the promise to open up “safe and secure” routes for refugees. In a year or two, the Labour Party in government may find itself with a crushing Commons majority of 200-plus, yet nothing particularly ambitious to do with such overwhelming power.

Of course, had Labour not been so cautious now, such future parliamentary success might not have been forthcoming. But if Sir Keir wants to leave something worthwhile after his (presumably) two terms in No 10, he might have to be a more radical, as well as a competent and reassuring, premier. Still, plenty of time to ease himself into that role.