Labour MPs fear Keir Starmer’s cautious approach could help Liz Truss

"People have no clear idea what Labour or its leader stand for. A growing number of Labour MPs wonder whether they made the right choice, fearing their leader is relying too heavily on Tories losing the next election and not doing enough to win it.”

There is internal grumbling that he is not giving a strong enough lead, including on policy, and about the performance of his private office. The leader, a forensic lawyer, has “helped to destroy public trust in the government. The task now is to build confidence and trust in the Labour Party”.

I wrote those words almost 30 years ago, about the then opposition leader John Smith. To my surprise, my article in The Sunday Times is now doing the rounds among academics and Labour figures on the grounds the words apply to Keir Starmer today.

Some Labour MPs agree, while Starmer allies naturally dispute such criticism. There is common ground that Starmer has much to do and no time to waste as he returns to work today from his holiday. Gordon Brown filled the vacuum with his own proposals for tackling the cost of living crisis, including the possible nationalisation of energy companies who do not lower bills.

That jarred with Starmer’s recent move away from nationalisation and New Labour veterans accused Brown of being up to his old tricks, using the fallow month of August to position himself to the left of the leader – once Tony Blair, now Starmer.

With the Tory leadership contenders kicking lumps out of each other, Labour’s virtual absence from the pitch didn’t matter as much as it would in normal times. But the opposition needs to catch up. As one shadow cabinet member admitted, the government’s theft of Labour’s flagship policy of a windfall tax on oil and gas producers “left our cupboard pretty empty”.

Although Labour has finally started to outline what it would do about energy bills, it is dawning on senior party figures that the already challenging bar for Starmer will become even higher with Boris Johnson’s departure.

The days when many in Labour hoped Liz Truss would become prime minister because she was beatable have given way to a recognition that the party underestimates her at its peril.

“To get this far, she clearly has something about her. She has undoubtedly grown in confidence and stature during the leadership election,” one Starmer ally told me.

All year, Labour has talked up its annual conference in Liverpool next month as an important milestone for the party’s policy and direction, but the event could now be overshadowed by the early weeks of the new government. Starmer will also have to manage tricky internal differences over strikes and joining picket lines and strained relations with the trade unions, whose leaders will enjoy their annual spell in the media spotlight at the TUC and Labour conferences.

If Truss enters Downing Street, as now looks inevitable, she would be clever enough to make her administration look "new" (to the voters) rather than “continuity Boris Johnson” (as she positions herself to Tory members). The government machine will get behind her and, despite the bitter divisions of the leadership contest, the ruthless party will turn to its battle with the real enemy in Labour.

Labour sources insist Truss’s Achilles heel would be handing tax cuts to the better off and big business via lower national insurance and corporation tax. That would bolster Labour’s “fair tax” strategy, which I wrote about recently. But Labour cannot rely on Truss making a catastrophic error that wrecks her premiership at the outset. She knows she would have to help low-income groups and is already hinting at a change of heart.

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Some Labour MPs rightly fear Truss’s next trick will be to become an anti-establishment PM, as Johnson managed before shooting himself in both feet. “The danger for us is that she is the insurgent and Keir looks like an establishment figure,” one Labour insider said. The former director of public prosecutions was the right man to take on the rule-breaking Johnson but – just as being “not Corbyn” is not enough to guarantee election victory – being “not Boris” is of no use now.

We never found out whether the criticism of John Smith listed above was valid; tragically, he died in 1994. He would almost certainly have won the 1997 general election. Now the ruthless Tories have (again) changed their leader, they will not be as vulnerable now as they were then under John Major’s premiership.

Starmer can avoid the establishment label by unveiling radical policies as part of a long overdue narrative of how Labour would change Britain. His critics fear his caution will prevent that, saying he has swallowed whole a New Labour playbook that is 25 years out of date. His most important task now is to prove them wrong.