Can principled politicians ever change their mind (and, yes, that means you, too, Sir Keir)?

Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak have both squirmed during TV election debates when faced with questions about Jeremy Corbyn and Liz Truss respectively – but we should encourage leaders to renounce their predecessors, says Sean O’Grady

Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer in happier days (PA)

Have you been watching the various television debates and party leader interviews? Is it not remarkable how much time Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak spend having to talk about their immediate predecessors?

Despite all of their respective efforts to “move on”, Jeremy Corbyn and Liz Truss are haunting this election campaign – and there is nothing either of these candidate prime ministers can do to exorcise the malign spectral presence of their former leaders.

Of the pair, it is Starmer who is suffering the most from the suspicion that, even as he unveils his very own “Changed Labour” manifesto. Sunak can say, and did, that he warned his party about Truss when they fought the first 2022 leadership election, and has spent his premiership repairing the damage she inflicted in the party and the country, albeit with mixed results.

Starmer, on the other hand, worked with Corbyn almost from the moment he entered the Commons in 2015; and his 2019 leadership contest manifesto had a distinctly Corbynite/Momentum-friendly tone. So why has this man of principle… changed?

During his Sky News interview, political editor Beth Rigby did an expert job on pressing Starmer on his recent political journey, persistently asking him precisely why, as recently as 2019, he declared that Corbyn would make “a great prime minister”. He did not look or sound comfortable.

Starmer, we will recall, served moderately loyally as a senior shadow cabinet member under Corbyn all the way through the experiment, campaigned for him in two general elections, and didn’t – like, say, Hilary Benn or Lisa Nandy – quit, or refuse a post under the old socialist. All Starmer could say is that he didn’t think Labour would win (though they came close enough in 2017); and that after the party crashed at the 2019 election, he decided things had to change – though, again, how radically he perhaps wasn’t that crystal clear about at the time.

Starmer finds all this awkward because there is no logical, policy or principle-based answer that a studio audience will readily accept. The correct answer is “That’s politics” – which is unsayable.

Leaders, and especially great leaders, have to do grubby and inconsistent things from time to time because otherwise nothing would change and nothing would get done and women wouldn’t have the vote and the Tories would have abolished the NHS and the welfare state in the 1950s. U-turns, breaking supposedly sacred manifesto promises (something party activists seem to think should be made a criminal offence), eating your words, sacking your closest friends… it’s a rough old trade.

But, of course, neither Starmer nor Sunak, nor anyone else, can admit as much, because “integrity” is such an overrated virtue, and pragmatism is taken, wrongly, to mean you didn’t believe in anything. Starmer is caught in just such a trap – as was Sunak, when he rashly declared on day one of his premiership, with full knowledge of what a ropey, randy bunch of bandits he was now leading, that “this government will have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level”. Foolish.

If we all ran our lives like this, no one would ever get divorced, change their job or move their energy supplier – and we’d be in a bit of a mess.

Yet it is commonplace in politics. Let us take the example of that pre-eminent conviction politician, Margaret Thatcher. She served as a loyal, if sometimes doubting, minister in Ted Heath’s government and campaigned for him to be prime minister again in two general elections in 1974, the latter on a promise to form a “government of national unity” that she certainly did not believe in, and most likely though the man would lose. Her subsequent leadership of the opposition and premiership was one long repudiation of everything Ted stood for. Right or wrong, it was something she felt she had to do, and it would have been preposterous for her to carry on for ever pretending otherwise.

Much the same goes for Tony Blair. In 1983, in his first general election, he argued that Michael Foot should be prime minister; later on, he did the same for Neil Kinnock, on manifestos that he, the future leader, had no great faith in. In his own polite, slippery way, Blair, too, renounced what his predecessors stood for, even including the Labour governments led by James Callaghan and Harold Wilson. That was because Blair too had to take his party and the nation in a different election.

I may as well mention, too, that Winston Churchill, a man who defined leadership on a global scale, switched parties twice and spent much of his long career undoing and unsaying stuff he’d said and done before, up to an including forming a war time alliance with the Bolshevik Soviet Union. As he candidly remarked in that very context: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference of the Devil in the House of Commons." There is a bloke unafraid of changing his tune.

So really, we should be a bit more understanding towards Starmer with the Corbyn thing, and forgive Sunak for being in the same political party as Truss (still a Tory candidate, and technically campaigning for Sunak to be re-elected). It’s not their fault that we try to impose impossible moral and political consistency on them, and try to prevent them from doing the right thing, even if it breaches some manifesto pledge or other – like, say, putting up taxes to pay for the massive furlough scheme, as Sunak had to.

We should get real, and let them (and ourselves) leave Corbyn and Truss behind.