The Tories are jittery and Keir Starmer has one final chance to tell voters what he stands for

A few weeks ago, senior Labour figures were confident Boris Johnson had been rumbled by voters as an incompetent liar who didn’t stand for anything now that Brexit is done. Then Johnson announced a tax rise for the NHS and social care which wrong-footed Labour, carried out a smooth reshuffle and showed “global Britain” might mean something after all when he struck a security pact with the US and Australia. Cue more Labour gloom and “can we ever win again?” syndrome.

Yet in our volatile political world, the tables have already turned again. The energy and cost of living crises, and supply chain problems (some due to Brexit) are a real threat to the Tories, who are suddenly the more jittery of the two parties, and thus offer a real opportunity to Labour. The party’s conference in Brighton, starting today, will tell us whether Keir Starmer can take it.

According to Starmer’s critics, this favourable backdrop makes it the wrong time to start another internal Labour battle by trying to change the way Labour elects its leader, decides policy at its conference and reselects its MPs. Yet sitting back and enjoying the Tories’ troubles will not be enough. Starmer is proposing these changes because he is convinced that, in order to have a chance of winning the next election, his party must persuade the country it has changed. In 2005, when Labour last won a majority, 67 per cent of people believed the party was capable of strong government. Today the figure is 33 per cent, according to Opinium Research.

While Starmer will have something to say next week about the climate crisis and decarbonisation, the word among his allies is that he wants to “de-Corbynise” the party – so voters know another Corbyn-style takeover is not possible. The most important reform would be electing Labour’s leader by an electoral college in which MPs, trade unions and party members each have a third of the votes, rather than the “one member, one vote” ballot of members which chose Corbyn and Starmer.

Team Starmer is slightly disingenuous when it argues that the left’s hero Tony Benn proposed such an electoral college in 1981; his goal was to dilute the power of MPs, who previously held 100 per cent of the votes. But Starmer has been too risk averse and he is right to be bold. It’s far from certain all his reforms will be approved by the conference; he might have to make a tactical retreat to get some of them through at a later stage.

The left don’t understand why he is picking a fight with his own party and even some supporters are bemused. One shadow cabinet minister told me: “There is too much ‘I’m not Jeremy Corbyn’.” Starmer aides counter that too many people in the party and unions are obsessed with winning internal battles rather than the next election. His surprise move to change Labour’s rules leaves Starmer open to the same charge but he is determined to draw a final line under the Corbyn era; next year’s conference would be the last before the 2023 election Labour expects Johnson to call, so internal matters must be settled now before moving on to winning the country.

Left-wingers accuse Starmer of lurching to the Blairite right and abandoning the pledges which won him the leadership last year. But his 12,000-word Fabian pamphlet “The Road Ahead” is neither Blairite nor a return to the approach of Ed Miliband. One Starmer ally quipped: “We are lurching to the centre.” They claimed this reflects a shift among Labour’s 400,000 members; some left-wingers attracted to the party by Corbyn have departed so the balance of power in constituency parties, if not the unions, has shifted back towards the centre. Starmer hopes this will be evident in Brighton.

His “contribution society” reflects Tony Blair’s “rights and responsibilities” agenda but applies it to business in a way Blair did not. It is also deliberately more pro-business than Miliband. Labour cannot simply outbid today’s high-spending Tories because it needs to regain the voters’ trust on the economy. But there are still plenty of dividing lines with the Tories. As I predicted in this column, Labour will promise to tackle insecure work and poverty pay in a way the Tories will struggle to match. Starmer is on the right agenda by offering “security” and “opportunity”, while contrasting Labour’s patriotism with Johnson’s nationalism.

Significantly, Starmer’s essay praised what the Blair and Brown governments got right, rather than trashing their record, and thus the party’s brand, as the left has done for the past 11 years – hardly a good signal to voters. But an “all our yesterdays” pitch won’t win an election; as Starmer recognises, Labour has won when it has “seized the future”.

Although leaders’ conference speeches are often over-hyped as “crucial”, for Starmer’s address next Wednesday the label is an understatement. With his personal ratings down on last year and internal criticism mounting, his task is to tell voters who he is, what he and his party stand for and give them a direction of travel on policy which offers an appealing alternative to the Tories. It’s his last chance to do it.