Keir Starmer and the march of the centrist dads

The Labour leader is joining Justin Trudeau for the most cuddly gathering in world politics, but there’s method in his meekness, writes John Rentoul

The centrist dads’ get-together in Montreal may seem like a cuddly gathering of the commonsensicals, but for Starmer it has a hard-edged purpose (PA)

The centrist revival is gathering pace. Centrist dads are generally self-mocking figures of fun, as anyone who has seen the video of Robert Peston and Ed Balls performing “Anarchy in the UK” in a band called the Centrist Dads will know.

But they also capture something of the mood of the times. Every other podcast these days seems to offer a variation on the theme, with Ed Balls and George Osborne now joining Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell in offering tension without toxicity – respectful disagreement that sits comfortably within the Overton window of bipartisan reasonableness.

This trend is a welcome antidote to the forces of chaos that have destabilised Western politics for so many years.

Instead of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Viktor Orban, the cast list at the Global Progress Action Summit in Montreal this weekend is a roll call of reassuring pragmatists: Justin Trudeau, the Liberal prime minister of Canada; Jonas Gahr Støre, the Labour prime minister of Norway; and Keir Starmer, the probable next Labour prime minister of the UK.

They will have to rebrand as centrist parents, because they will be joined by Jacinda Ardern, the Labour former prime minister of New Zealand, and Sanna Marin, the social democratic former prime minister of Finland. It is no coincidence that Marin has just resigned as an MP to work for Tony Blair’s Institute for Global Change, and Blair, centrist grandad, will be at the Montreal shindig too.

Blair, and David Miliband, the former head of his No 10 Policy Unit, will be able to tell Starmer to enjoy the limelight while it lasts. A “shadow cabinet minister recently returned from Washington” told The Times this week: “When you are 20 points ahead in the polls, you find people whose diaries might otherwise have been full have all the time in the world.”

Starmer will be hailed as a conquering hero before he has even conquered anyone, because most of the left-wing leaders who are actually in power, including Trudeau, are facing growing unpopularity at home – and may be hoping that some of the shine of hopeful opposition will rub off on them.

Blair, who had actually humiliated the British right in 1997, found himself treated like a rock star at gatherings of European socialists and social democrats afterwards – so much so that Lionel Jospin, the French socialist prime minister elected a month later, had his nose put out of joint.

It was Miliband who tried to bring some intellectual weight to this adulation for a landslide election winner, organising a series of wonkfests under the “progressive governance” label. Guests included Bill Clinton, who loved nothing better than detailed comparative policy analysis across the world, and Hillary Clinton, prepping for entry into politics in her own right.

These gatherings continued during the Blair years. I attended one in Budapest in 2004, hosted by Ferenc Gyurcsany, the newly elected socialist prime minister of Hungary. It was a classic of the genre, because Blair used it to generate headlines back home, securing two in The Guardian on successive days: “Tony Blair tonight used a speech to centre-left leaders in Hungary to hint a Labour third term would see a crackdown on welfare claimants,” and “Tony Blair insisted today that the government would not raise taxes.”

Starmer has learned well from The Master, using his Canadian talking-shop, trumpeted as the largest such gathering for 15 years, to advertise his message that the left today is tough on borders. This fits with his trip to Europol in the Netherlands on Thursday, and his visit to Paris on Monday, where he will discuss his plan to treat people-smugglers as terrorists and talk about (but not actually secure) a deal to return failed asylum seekers to EU countries through which they have travelled to get to the UK.

The theme of secure national borders is a good one to talk about with left-of-centre leaders who are in power or have been in power, because they tend to be just as restrictive about accepting asylum seekers as right-wing leaders. Immigration need not be a right-wing issue. Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s campaign director, has been quoted as saying: “There is no such thing as a right-wing issue.” Some left-wing leaders in government, such as Ardern, even closed their borders altogether during the pandemic.

It all helps wipe the British voters’ memories of the “no borders, no armies, above us only sky” utopianism of the Jeremy Corbyn period of Labour history. The centrist dads’ get-together in Montreal may seem like a cuddly gathering of the commonsensicals, but for Starmer it has a hard-edged purpose.