Starmer recasts Labour as a government-in-waiting

Sir Keir Starmer seems able to cope with the unexpected quite well. In an appalling breach of security, a protester was able to get onto the Labour conference stage and cover the Labour leader in what looked like emerald-green glitter. Sir Keir, showing the positive side of being what Boris Johnson used to call a “useless bollard”, took it in his stride and turned it to his advantage. Out went the boring blue jacket; in came the would-be statesman, ready to roll up his sleeves. “Good in a crisis,” as the pollsters like to put it.

It proves why Mr Johnson underestimated Mr Starmer, right up until the moment that Sir Keir’s forensic questioning about Partygate helped force him out of No 10. His current opponents in the Conservative Party would be well advised not to make the same mistake.

True, this was not a speech rich in policy detail, but there will be time for that much closer to the election and the launch of the manifesto. As an eve-of-election year rally, it was an unalloyed success.

Sir Keir obviously has some talented speechwriters, and his delivery is getting better. He had some fine lines, balancing the optimism every party needs to get out on the doorsteps and churning out the memes with the uncomfortable fact that there won’t be much money around in the next few years. The leader of the opposition offered his party – and the wider audience at home – “the hope of the hard road”.

He set the challenges ahead in a neatly constructed and comprehensible historical context: “Our job in ’97 was to rebuild a crumbling public realm. In ’64 it was to modernise an economy left behind by the pace of technology; in ’45, to build a new Britain out of the trauma of collective sacrifice.

“Then in ’24, it will have to be all three.”

He left out 1974 when the party had to end a crippling strike and tackle spiralling inflation – but it was the right perspective nonetheless.

It was not, though, content-free. He pitched net zero – which Labour is rightly sticking to – against the Tories’ “scorched earth”. He did not overemphasise the less agreeable parts of the green agenda, but he did make much of his plans for the new GB Energy and the drive for clean, green cheap energy, which will do more than any other single policy to cut industrial and household bills and boost the economy.

Unlike Rishi Sunak, the leader of the opposition was able to talk about the cost of living with a real sense of authenticity – someone picking up a “treat” at the supermarket, only to immediately return it to the shelf. Perhaps that’s something the Labour team picked up from their focus groups, but it was skilfully deployed, and the point was driven home with a barbed reference to the prime minister’s weakness for short-haul helicopter trips.

For the first time since the beginning of Gordon Brown’s time as prime minister, Labour is presenting the British people with someone they can actually imagine chairing cabinet, going head-to-head with President Macron, and standing firm against strikers asking too much from the taxpayer.

At the moment, Sir Keir is only hinting at the steel that he will have to use if he and his colleagues are to make the most of the limited resources at their disposal. They will need to reform the NHS, for example, rather than open the chequebook; and fiscal responsibility is “non-negotiable” – and his conference appeared to accept this.

Partly, they are simply weary of losing, realise the mountain to climb ahead of them, and have seen what their leader has achieved already.

Sir Keir was gifted a simultaneous collapse of a Conservative administration in London that gives extremism a bad name; and an SNP government at Holyrood in a state of rapid unplanned disassembly. Yet there was nothing inevitable about Labour’s revival and finding themselves a leader with the self-confidence to take them back to power.

There is evidence that he became leader through a “false prospectus” because the manifesto for the 2019 leadership election bears little resemblance to his current policies. But nobody seems to care now that the party enjoys a 17-point lead over the Conservatives.

His failure to mention Brexit was regrettable but, at this juncture, there seems little point in jeopardising a winning strategy when rejoining is not a realistic prospect: Better, surely, to explore the options opportunistically from the safety of government.

By trimming, reneging and flip-flopping, Sir Keir has placed his party in a position where he can plausibly appeal to lifelong Conservatives to support him. These are the people actually or metaphorically “purged” by Mr Johnson and Dominic Cummings during their disastrous period of populist experimentation; then repulsed by the sheer recklessness of Liz Truss; and now disappointed by Mr Sunak’s tolerance of incompetence and extremism.

They were, and are, Remainers, moderates, compassionate Conservatives and find life uncomfortable in the party of Suella Braverman. If they’d wanted that sort of politics, they’d have joined Ukip and become Faragistes. Now there is talk of Nigel Farage taking over as the party slides towards defeat.

In a way, Sir Keir’s was a speech that could have been delivered by an earlier generation of “one nation” Conservatives, dating back to the time when they took housing the people to be their duty, embraced the role of the state rather than market economics, and viewed Europe as partner, not foe.

A figure such as Michael Heseltine could have spoken Sir Keir’s line about the current leadership: “They still cleave to the set of ideas that came out of the 1980s: the dismissal of industrial strategy, the contempt for active government, the complacency that says only the market decides which industries matter for working people and national security […] They can’t cope with a world where other countries simply don’t behave in the way market dogma expects.”

Sir Keir is a leader who commands the respect and loyalty of his party. If he has matured, then so have they. There is no longer equivocation about antisemitism or Israel’s right to exist. When Sir Keir condemned “the senseless murder of men, women and children – including British citizens – in cold blood by the terrorists of Hamas”, his audience gave him an ovation. The contrast with the recent past is stark.

Labour people are grateful for what he has done for them, and the achievement, even in relatively benign political circumstances, that took them from the worst result since 1935 nationally (and since 1918 in Scotland) to the verge of government. Not even Harold Wilson or Tony Blair managed to do what Sir Keir seems to be on course of doing – a record shift in political loyalties.

The activists’ enthusiasm is palpable, and comparable to that of a child on Christmas Eve. But there is the risk of disappointment, and Sir Keir made sure that they and the voters knew just how hard a slog the “decade of national renewal” is going to be to get Britain back to growth.

It will take two terms, at least, and the Starmer Decade, if it comes to pass, will be much less fun than the Blair Decade. As someone else once said, however, there is no alternative.