The moment Keir Starmer revealed himself to be a hardcore Blairite

It was a pretty dull speech in Milton Keynes – so far, so Keir. But, says John Rentoul, the Labour leader then asked for questions – and something rather surprising happened…

Labour leader Starmer gives a speech in Silverstone, to mark the fourth anniversary of his party’s most recent electoral wipeout (PA)

One sentence in Keir Starmer’s speech in Milton Keynes today stood out: “Working people up and down our country looked at my party, looked at how we’d lost our way, not just under Jeremy Corbyn, but for a while – and they said ‘no’.”

The speech marked the fourth anniversary of Labour’s crushing defeat on this day in 2019. As such, the Labour leader is playing politics on “easy” mode. He is trying to avoid interrupting the Conservative Party while it is making the mistake of refighting the Brexit wars. But he doesn’t want to hide away.

He wants to be visible, looking confident and repeating what most voters already think – namely, that this government is a shambles and it is time for a change.

However, even a bland speech must be followed, these days, by journalists’ questions. The prime minister takes as few as possible, including one from GB News, but the leader of the opposition has a chance to prove how open, confident and different he is – so Starmer took questions from all the journalists who had made the short-notice trip a few miles out of London.

This meant that Kumail Jaffer of the Daily Mail got to ask what Starmer meant by that sentence, in which he appeared to blame Ed Miliband as well as Corbyn for Labour losing its way.

“This isn’t about an individual,” Starmer said, before going on to make it about three individuals: “I was reflecting the fact that we lost four elections in a row.”

In other words, he was talking about 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019. When Gordon Brown was leader, when Miliband was leader and two when Corbyn was leader. If this was “not about individuals”, why did Starmer mention Corbyn by name, and say that the party had lost its way “not just under” him?

He praised Miliband as a “very important member of the shadow cabinet” who is “leading on climate change”, but at the same time said that he presided over an election defeat in 2015, when the party had “lost its way”.

Perhaps he meant that the Labour Party is a collective enterprise in which all members or all MPs or all shadow ministers are jointly responsible for their failure to win against David Cameron. But he is not normally so modest about the role and responsibility of the party leader.

Today, for example, he said that a Labour government would be good at “smashing” the criminal people-smuggling gangs because he was the director of public prosecutions who smashed terrorist gangs. And he explained that he had nothing to do with Corbyn’s leadership when he was in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, but served because he felt that he “had a responsibility when the country was grappling with Brexit”.

If Starmer holds the leader accountable for losing elections, therefore, the ultimate responsibility for defeat in 2015 must lie with his shadow energy secretary. Not only that, but by taking the blame game back to 2010, Starmer also holds Brown responsible for alienating voters.

This is what I call a hardcore Blairite position. It is my view that things started to go wrong for the Labour Party on 27 June 2007. I agree with Tony Blair that any departure from the true path of New Labour, even by a millimetre, leads to electoral ruin. And so it came to pass.

Brown didn’t depart far from the eternal truths, and he even brought back Peter Mandelson as first secretary of state to try to keep the party on the strait and narrow. But the voters could tell they weren’t being offered the real thing, and they responded accordingly.

After he was defeated, Brown organised to help win the succession for his preferred candidate, Miliband, and Miliband paved the way for Corbyn. So Labour started to lose its way the moment Blair stood down – and for 13 years, the party wandered ever further from the virtuous path.

Only now, under Starmer, elected as a unity candidate by disappointed Corbyn supporters, is he scrabbling to try to get back on the route to salvation.

Starmer’s true beliefs remain as cloudy as ever. Someone who knows him of old told me recently: “I sometimes think that he no longer distinguishes between his ambition to be prime minister and his real views.” But recognising that losing elections is a bad thing is a good start.

If the party now realises that the apostolic succession of wrongness, of Brown, Miliband and Corbyn, was a 13-year detour in the wilderness, that can only be a good thing for the party and for the country.

Welcome back to the true path of Blairism, Sir Keir.