Sir Softie gets tough: the reinvention of Keir Starmer

Since 2010, Rishi Sunak told the Commons in April, “there are 20,000 more police officers, we have given them more powers, and we have toughened up sentencing – all opposed by Sir Softie over there”. It was an unusually childish and Boris-like attack on Keir Starmer by the prime minister, which tells us something about how the election campaign will be fought.

The Conservatives are desperate to portray the Labour leader as a hand-wringing north London liberal, soft on crime, weak on immigration and spineless generally. Which is why we can expect to hear more about the letter Starmer signed just before he became leader of the opposition, calling for the suspension of deportation flights for criminals.

Equally, Starmer is desperate to disown the Sir Softie label, which helps to explain the ruthlessness he has shown on Labour Party discipline. As leader of the opposition, he can try to sound tough in what he says, but as party leader he has a chance to prove his toughness in the way he runs Labour.

Hence today’s report that he intends to block several Labour MPs from standing again at the next election. Khalid Mahmood, Liam Byrne and Neil Coyle have all experienced reputational problems, and although they might have thought they had been resolved, it turns out that Starmer may not regard their cases as closed.

This seems harsh to me, especially in Coyle’s case: he has given up alcohol and seems genuinely contrite; he says he is determined to learn the lesson of having racially abused a journalist.

But from Starmer’s point of view, the harshness is the point. When he stopped Jeremy Corbyn running as a Labour candidate, he was cheered by Blairites and condemned as a dictator by Momentum, the dwindling Corbyn supporters’ club. But when the Labour machine kept Jamie Driscoll, a “soft” Corbynite, off the shortlist for the mayoralty of the North East, some of the wider “soft” left was alarmed.

Sir Softie cannot afford to be soft on the soft left. But the crackdown extends beyond ideology. “If there are people that are going to cause us embarrassment in the future,” a Labour source told The Times, they will be prevented from standing for election as official Labour candidates.

Meanwhile Labour’s national executive has shut down Leicester East Labour Party, which has previously sent Keith Vaz and Claudia Webbe as MPs to Westminster (Vaz stood down after offering to buy drugs for male sex workers; Webbe still sits as an independent after her sentence for harassing a love rival was reduced on appeal).

Party HQ sent “hit squads” into underperforming Labour groups on councils before the local elections, including Leicester, Birmingham, Croydon, Blackpool, Stoke-on-Trent, Dudley and the Wirral, according to The Times. In one training session, participants were issued with a quotation from Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery: “I have no intention of launching our great attack until we are completely ready.” Another quotation came as a warning: “I will tolerate no bellyaching. If anyone objects to doing what he is told, then he can get out of it, and at once.”

That is the image that Starmer wants to project, and if it offends the tender sensibilities of some in the party, that helps project it further. Thus when Steve Reed, the shadow justice secretary, produced a Twitter advert accusing Sunak of being soft on paedophiles, Starmer, who hadn’t seen the advert, stood by it. The Labour leader told Just Stop Oil protesters: “Get up; go home.” He said, “we’re not changing that policy” when asked if he would restore welfare benefits to families with three children.

In every policy area, Starmer describes himself as “tough”, prepared to take the difficult decisions, while the Conservatives are weak and ineffectual. The crumbling concrete closing 100 schools, days before the start of term, is a gift of a metaphor for him.

He realises that he is at the height of his power over the party in the year before an election that he is expected to win. He has to be careful about the formal way that power is exercised, because as leader he is not supposed to interfere in disciplinary matters. That was why blocking Corbyn as a Labour candidate was presented as a political decision in the electoral interests of the party.

But he knows that if he doesn’t use his power now, he will regret it later. He may even have read that part of Tony Blair’s memoir where the former prime minister said: “It was always odd to be described as having this incredibly ruthless machine, when actually we had plenty of ruth; indeed, on occasions, far too much of it.” Blair could have expelled Corbyn from the Parliamentary Labour Party, for example, but didn’t see the point.

Starmer won’t make that kind of mistake. Not least because he needs to present himself to the voters as utterly ruthless to try to prevent the Tories hanging the “Sir Softie” tag on him.