Starmer could do with taking a leaf out of Blair’s book

When Blair was prime minister, he discussed but rejected the idea of banning Corbyn as a Labour election candidate, writes Andrew Grice

Starmer still needs to win power and is convinced that sending voters a message that he is ‘not Corbyn’ will help (Getty)

When Tony Blair was prime minister, he discussed but rejected the idea of banning Jeremy Corbyn as a Labour election candidate on the grounds he was a serial rebel who had voted against the New Labour government hundreds of times.

Why, then, did Keir Starmer take the opposite view this week and prevent Corbyn standing for Labour?

Blair already enjoyed the luxury of a huge Commons majority and thought he could let sleeping left-wing dogs lie. (With hindsight, a mistake: they woke up to bite New Labour and, remarkably, make Corbyn leader.)

Starmer still needs to win power and is convinced that sending voters a message that he is “not Corbyn” will help. Allies saw his move as a “win, win”: either Corbyn accepts the decision and melts away or stands as an independent and reminds voters he is outside Labour. Corbyn is viewed as a diminishing force by Starmer allies, who hopes some left-wingers will quietly distance themselves from Corbyn because the antisemitism controversy has tarnished the whole Labour left.

There was an unstated reason for Starmer’s move: he is anxious to avoid his government being held to ransom by the Socialist Campaign Group, which currently has 34 MPs. Constant negotiations with his own party would not be a good look. The Tories and their newspaper cheerleaders would claim a left-wing tail was wagging the government dog. Some trade unions would back the rebel MPs.

If Starmer secured only a small majority or headed a minority Labour government – perfectly possible outcomes given the mountain he must climb and Rishi Sunak’s recent fightback – he might want to call another election in the hope a bigger majority would marginalise the left. But that would be risky; Brenda from Bristol would not be impressed.

Corbyn has hinted to friends he will run as an independent in the Islington North seat he has represented since 1983, saying he wants to continue to fight for his constituents. “I am not going to walk away from these people,” Corbyn told one ally. “They [the Labour leadership] are trying to get my head but they won’t get it.”

Privately, senior Labour figures fear Corbyn would win as an independent, as Ken Livingstone did in the 2000 London mayoral election. One told me: “Jeremy is incredibly popular in his constituency. He attends everything. He would turn up to open an envelope.”

However, some left-wing allies are pleading with Corbyn not to run against his party, arguing he would have more influence as a former leader even without being an MP. Even some on the soft left are uncomfortable, saying he has replaced the factionalism under Corbyn with his own factionalism despite promising to end it.

One Labour MP said Starmer is “hoping for a bonus of more scalps” – that left-wing MPs rally behind Corbyn, so Labour could ban them as candidates to reduce the left’s influence in parliament. Starmer has already limited the left’s strength through a command-and-control approach to the selection of Labour candidates.

Left-wingers are seething at Starmer’s attack on his predecessor – not least because some of them backed him for the leadership three years ago because he offered “Corbynism without Corbyn.” The left is down, but not out. “The ghost of Corbyn takes some exorcising,” writes Andrew Murray, a former Corbyn aide in his readable, thought-provoking book Is Socialism Possible in Britain?

“Corbyn-era policies, including the reviled 2019 manifesto, remain overwhelmingly popular among party members… Corbynism worked – almost,” writes Murray, who portrays Starmer as a stooge of the Labour right, which views him as “a most serviceable vehicle for their campaign to crush socialism in the Labour Party.”

He admits the “shortcomings” of Corbyn’s leadership, saying socialism “got lost in 2019 beneath a clutter of gratis goodies, bestowed on the public at bewildering speed” and that Labour “drowned itself in Euro-equivocation” – its pledge of a second Brexit referendum. The bitter irony for the left is that Starmer, the architect of this policy, has banned Corbyn on the grounds he is a vote-loser.

Left-wing MPs have spotted the Corbyn trap set by Starmer and will not walk into it. That’s why their comments about Corbyn’s ban have been very restrained. They want Labour to win but some eyes are on another prize: holding the balance of power in the Commons and using it to pressurise a Starmer government to reject austerity and tackle poverty. Such a battle would be very likely given the public spending squeeze Labour would inherit from the Tories.

His left critics warn that Starmer’s move against Corbyn, whom he wanted to be PM in 2019, will underline the Tory attack on him as an opportunist who says one thing to get elected and does another afterwards.

But Starmer has set his course: he has brushed aside the old maxim that divided parties lose votes, calculating that most voters will back him in a fight with his own party, whether that comes before or after the election. With the left keeping its head down for now, the battle will probably happen afterwards.