Keir Starmer’s promises on crime will come back to bite him

The Labour leader is a surprisingly unconvincing crusader on law and order, writes John Rentoul

Rishi Sunak is keen to paint Kier Starmer as the north London liberal lawyer that he is (PA)

Keir Starmer had a good moment at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday. Rishi Sunak accused Labour of being soft on crime, and Starmer retorted: “The only criminal investigation that the prime minister has ever been involved in is the one that found him guilty of breaking the law.”

It was an effective shot across the despatch boxes, but there are risks for Starmer in personalising the issue. He secured a victory last year by promising to resign if he were fined by the police for breaking lockdown law. Unlike Boris Johnson and Sunak, he wasn’t fined, as he boasted in his speech today: “If I’d broken those same rules, I just couldn’t have looked the British people in the eye and asked for their trust.”

But there are dangers for a politician in claiming to be “purer than pure” – a phrase Tony Blair once used that was wrapped round his neck, usually misquoted as “whiter than white”, ever after.

When Sunak received another fixed penalty notice in January, after he was filmed in the back of a moving car without wearing a seatbelt, video emerged of Starmer being interviewed in the back of a moving taxi in 1997, four years after passengers were required by law to wear seatbelts. He was a barrister at the time, talking about the free legal help he gave to the defendants in the McLibel case.

So he has broken the same kind of law that he attacks Sunak and Johnson for breaking. Fortunately for him, people care only about Johnson breaking Coronavirus laws, but there is the ever-present danger that the charge of hypocrisy might take hold.

That danger is compounded by the nagging feeling that Starmer is posing as a tough crimefighter against his own liberal instincts. He delivered a good speech in Stoke today at the second attempt (the first attempt on Monday turned into a news conference about the Casey report on racism and sexism in the Metropolitan Police). The speech took crime seriously, and quoted both Blair and Margaret Thatcher, two prime ministers who were trusted by voters on the issue.

Significantly, Starmer started to set some quantifiable benchmarks for Labour’s “mission” to “make Britain’s streets safe”. There are now four targets: “Restore confidence in every police force to its highest ever level”, presumably as measured by opinion polls; halve knife crime; “reverse the collapse in the proportion of crime solved”; and “halve the levels of violence against women and girls”.

But beyond “by solving more crime” and “by reducing the number of victims who drop out of the system” there was no clue as to how these targets might be achieved. Nor did Starmer set out a time by which they are to be achieved, despite a briefing to The Times that the last promise is “within a decade”. Nor has Labour allocated any new public spending to meet these targets. In answer to questions today, Starmer said his policies will be funded through “efficiency savings”.

This is feeble stuff. Without extra money, Starmer is relying even more on voters trusting not only that his instincts are genuinely tough on crime, but that he and Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, are so much more competent than the government that they will be able to magic up efficiency savings to pay for it all.

That is why Starmer makes so much of his record as head of the Crown Prosecution Service, so much so that he sometimes sounds as if he thinks he was the incorruptible sheriff bringing order to the wild west. It is why he gave an interview to the Express on Thursday, putting his face on the front page with the headline: “Police outside school gates can prevent knife crime.”

Not all the Tory tabloid press is so helpful. The Sun criticised him for having signed a letter, just before he became Labour leader three years ago, calling for the deportation of 50 offenders to Jamaica to be stopped. When he was asked about this today he said “you can’t blame the opposition for the failings of the government”, which was a good example of the stolidly ruthless way he deals with awkward questions.

Either he ignores the question or he seems to be reciting the lines he knows he needs to recite as an opposition politician trying to identify with the concerns of voters in focus groups. That is why Sunak is so keen to paint him as the north London liberal lawyer he is – the inauthenticity is dangerous to Starmer.

Labour is winning on crime at the moment, and Starmer had a good day in the Commons yesterday, but he is a long way from locking the door and throwing away the key.