The one thing Keir Starmer must do to win back Labour waverers

The party conference in Liverpool this month will be an opportunity for the new prime minister to make his supporters swallow some unpalatable truths – for the sake of the party’s mission, says John Rentoul

Keir Starmer’s ‘mission-driven government’ may have too many priorities – and therefore none at all (PA Wire)

Keir Starmer no doubt thinks he can do without Tony Blair’s advice on how to run a successful government. The former prime minister’s book, On Leadership, published today, was intended to appear before an election in October or November, when it could have contributed to a helpful debate for Labour about the failings of Conservative leadership.

Instead, it now reads as a rather pointed lecture to an apprentice from someone who knows a thing or two about “how to govern”.

Starmer may receive quizzically the advice that he needs a plan, and that “working it out is more complex than it might appear”. And especially the next part, with the emphasis in capitals: “Crucially, it has to establish PRIORITIES: if you try to do everything you will likely end up doing nothing.”

It reads almost as if Blair thinks that Starmer’s “mission-driven government” has too many priorities and, therefore, none at all.

The one piece of advice for which Starmer may be most sarcastically grateful is that Leadership (with a capital L) consists of “standing in front of a crowd that is expecting to be pleased but instead being prepared to displease it”.

As Starmer prepares for Labour’s annual conference later this month, he might observe that he will have no difficulty in displeasing many of his supporters. He has made a rather Blairite virtue of the tough choices that the new government has to make, and he has warned his party that there will be more difficult decisions to come.

The conference, which ought to be a celebration of an election victory, the scale of which was beyond the party’s wildest dreams, will therefore be a surprisingly challenging hurdle for him.

The formal business of the conference, which is still constitutionally Labour’s sovereign decision-making body, should not be a problem for Starmer. The tradition of local parties sending motions to conference seeking to embarrass the leadership has been suspended. The party is unhappy about the cut in winter fuel payments, the two-child limit on benefits and Gaza, but hostile motions on these subjects are unlikely to make it onto the agenda. I am told that “there are too few Momentum delegates for them to get anything through the priority ballot”, which in the past has been a way of tabling urgent motions critical of the leadership.

One of the largest unions, Unite, led by Sharon Graham, is hardly supportive of Starmer but the big unions usually get together to agree to push an issue of industrial policy. This year, they will presumably try to prevent Angela Rayner’s employment rights policy from being watered down.

Even the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform, rebranded as a wider coalition called Labour for a New Democracy (L4ND), says it is “not asking” local parties to send motions calling for proportional representation to this year’s conference.

But just because party managers maintain control of formal business, and just because Starmer loyalists are likely to win most seats in the national executive elections, does not mean that dissent will be kept out of the media coverage. Voices will be heard calling for the restoration of the winter fuel payment, the lifting of the two-child limit on benefits, the ending of “austerity” in general, or a total ban on arms sales to Israel. There will be fringe meetings, demos and a ready supply of delegates willing to be interviewed on TV.

In an effort to minimise coverage of winter fuel unhappiness, Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, has had her speech moved to the last day of conference – as Katy Balls, the political editor of The Spectator, spotted. “It’s when no one is there,” said an insider.

The test for Starmer at this conference is not to win the votes, therefore. They have been counted already. The challenge is much harder, namely to persuade the party, and the wider audience in the country, that the tough choices he is making are necessary and right. The danger is that the party knows all about the tough choices but cannot accept they are needed.

Rachel Reeves, who has modelled herself on Gordon Brown, has won a hearing for only half of his slogan, “prudence with a purpose”. There are an awful lot of people, in the Labour Party and outside, who think that she is pursuing “prudence” for its own sake.

The most important lesson that Blair can teach Starmer and Reeves is that he was the Great Persuader. He persuaded the party to accept things it did not like for the sake of its higher goals. He often used opposition from within the party as a way of dramatising his quest for reform – but he also won enough support from the party to help him carry out those ambitious reforms in government.