Keir Starmer is still haunted by the ghosts of Labour’s recent past

Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak tried to outdo each other in unity, in a chamber designed for disagreement. The leader of the opposition was at his most prime ministerial, opening his questions by observing that “the prime minister and I joined this House together in 2015”.

In other words, we are equals; equal in the ferocity of our support for the Ukrainian people. “We have lived through important moments in our domestic and international politics,” he said. “But none of those experiences compares to the pain and suffering of the people of Ukraine. Does the prime minister agree with me that right across this House it is vital that we all continue to stand together in full support of Ukraine?”

It turned out that Sunak did agree with him – and he also agreed with him in expressing condolences to all those affected by the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, which he, the prime minister, had omitted to do.

Starmer devoted all six of his questions to variations of his first. He said that before he served in parliament he had helped bring cases to the Hague on behalf of victims of Serbian aggression, and urged Sunak to ensure that war crimes committed by Vladimir Putin’s forces are prosecuted there. The prime minister said he was hopeful that there would be International Criminal Court indictments soon.

It was only in his sixth question that Starmer allowed a note of political contention to enter his words. Except that he was not disagreeing with the Conservative government, but with Labour’s recent past.

“As a country we have always been at our best when we stand up to tyrannical dictators threatening their neighbours and peace on our continent,” Starmer said. “That’s why the Labour Party helped found Nato and why our commitment to Nato is as unshakeable today as it was back then.”

There was a murmur of recognition in the chamber as MPs on both sides realised that he was attacking his predecessor as leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn disagreed with Nato standing up to Slobodan Milosevic, the tyrannical dictator who threatened his neighbours in Kosovo “and peace on our continent” in 1999. He regarded and still regards Nato as an imperialist alliance, and he blames Nato expansion for stoking the tension that led in his view to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

But here was Starmer praising Ernest Bevin, Labour’s post-war foreign secretary, as one of the “giants” who founded Nato. Here was Starmer, claiming that Labour’s commitment to Nato was as unshakeable now as it was then, which rather drew attention to the recent five-year period when it was very much shakeable.

“Does the prime minister agree with me that, whatever differences we may have, no matter what difficulties we face as a country, we in this House have a duty to stand on the shoulders of giants who came before us to support Ukraine’s fight for freedom, liberty and victory?” Starmer asked.

It was a multilayered question. One of the differences that Starmer and Sunak have had is that the prime minister has often accused his opposite number of working to elect Corbyn as leader of the country. Nobody’s interested in that, say Labour people. Just goes to show how desperate the Tories are if that is all they can come up with.

Except that today Starmer admitted that it is an important point, and that Sunak is entirely justified in raising it. The Labour leader’s commitment to Nato is so unshakeable that he was prepared to trade it for a ministerial limo little more than three years ago.

Or, more calculatedly, Starmer was prepared to make the compromises needed to ensure that the Bevinite tradition of Labour history survived in cryogenic suspension, ready to take over when the Corbynite spasm had passed. But that isn’t an argument that Starmer can make in public either.

Steve Bray, the anti-Brexit protester and former Lib Dem candidate, played “Things Can Only Get Better” on his sound system on a traffic island in Parliament Square during President Zelensky’s speech in Westminster Hall. No, I couldn’t make sense of it, either. But it did feel like a reminder that a Labour Party that stands up to tyranny – by force, if necessary – is back.