Keir Starmer’s speech this afternoon was billed as his “make or break”, his “turnaround” moment, the biggest hour of his career. As if it would be the talk of the school gates, top of the agenda at every Wetherspoon’s.
As if. In a week when there have been punch-ups on forecourts and soldiers readied to drive petrol tankers, a 90-minute soliloquy by any opposition politician is barely going to register in the public consciousness. That is perfectly natural; far more troubling is how little the public’s concerns impinged on the consciousness of anyone in the conference hall.
The Labour leader rattled through a perfunctory list of the factors behind the giant cost-of-living squeeze – fuel bills, empty supermarket shelves, the imminent cut to universal credit – and blamed the lot on the government, while giving little indication of what he would do differently. Then he settled back into the well-worn patter of failing Labour leaders, from Gordon Brown to Jeremy Corbyn: conference, let me tell you who I am.
For their part, most delegates dutifully stood and applauded every couple of minutes, alternating with hecklers. It was a kind of pantomime, in which Starmer put in a decent performance in front of an audience visibly wishing him well. It should garner him kindly headlines, but it will be long forgotten by the time Boris Johnson opens his mouth next week in Manchester.
“It will not take another election defeat for the Labour party to become an alternative government,” declared Starmer. Yet no one I’ve spoken to in his party – whether on its right wing or its left, whether MPs or advisers or council leaders – expects him to win the next election.
“It is Schrödinger’s cat,” one of Labour’s most powerful local government bosses told me after watching his leader on the Andrew Marr show on Sunday. “He is asked about an election that he will never win, and refuses to disclose policies that he will never enact.”
What we have seen in Brighton most of this week is not a Labour army preparing for almighty battle, for bloody noses and crack’d crowns. It is a party caught plotting, looking past its current leader and idly eyeing up possible replacements. “Make or break?” said one seasoned MP and a former frontbencher. “He’s already broken. He has been since losing Hartlepool, only just getting over the line in Batley and then getting buried in Amersham,” he said of the three spring byelections.
Outside the conference hall Starmer is a loser, runs the argument, so he must be a goner. And on both wings of the party, they sigh: we never imagined he could be so bad at politics.
Such pre-emptive obituaries of a politician only a year into the top job are rather too definite. The next few weeks could prove crucial in shaping our politics. Just after the benefit cuts and end of furlough comes what could be a tough budget and spending round.
Given how close these events are and how profound they will prove, Starmer should have spent a lot more time addressing them. At a time when it’s as hard to score a gallon of diesel as it is to see your GP, and even friendly newspapers implore the prime minister to “prenez un Grip”, Johnson is by no means guaranteed his longed-for decade at Number 10. Nevertheless, it is now impossible to imagine his Labour counterpart ever commanding a surge of enthusiasm or interest, even from the ground troops who will eventually go door-knocking for him. The top seafront attractions this week have been a past leader, in Jeremy Corbyn, the deputy leader (Angela “scum” Rayner) and a would-be leader (Andy Burnham).
The great ghost haunting Labour this week was that of a leader who left almost a decade and a half ago. Starmer now has Tony Blair’s speechwriter, one of his communications officials and his great consigliere, Peter Mandelson. The references to Blairism in Starmer’s speech got increasingly arch. “Education is so important I am tempted to say it three times!” ran one joke. For the Blairites, the secret to electoral success is to be seen to be antagonising your own party. Those advisers will have been rubbing their hands each time a heckler shouted about nurses’ pay.
The observers who have wondered this week just why the leader is fussing about party rules rather than fuel bills, and attacking Corbyn not Johnson, miss the point – this is how Starmer’s team believes the electorate will be won over. It is what they call “doing a Kinnock”, a reference to Mandelson’s first boss in politics. Except it didn’t win any elections for Neil, and it won’t for Keir.
Nobody has outlined the dangers of this strategy better than the late Stuart Hall. In his classic essay, The Crisis of Labourism, written in 1984 shortly after Neil Kinnock was elected Labour leader, Hall noted that the new man “shows little sign as yet of becoming a popular political force, as opposed to a (not very successful) electoral machine. Apart from the issue of the health service,[he] has shown little understanding of the need to confront the real basis of Thatcher populism in the country at large… [Kinnock] has no feel for the language and concerns of the new social movements, and that is dangerous.” Without that, warned Hall, Labour would ossify into mere bureaucracy.
Swap Kinnock for Starmer and Thatcher for Johnson, and you have about as good a summary of our moment as any that will be published this week. The great paradox is that it is Old Etonian Johnson who sits atop a social movement. He has morphed the Tory party into the Brexit party, his regime feeds off the splenetic energy of talk radio, and his advisers know precisely which stories to feed the Telegraph’s desire for competitive victimhood.
Never mind that this is a party funded by shadow bankers and trumpeted by media oligarchs, and whose core voter is a wealthy pensioner in the home counties; Johnson wants to build a hegemony that stretches up through the Midlands to the north-east, and whose chief identity is a post-Brexit, weaponised Englishness.
He acts the tousle-haired insurgent. Starmer, by contrast, spends his days auditioning for the role of red-faced, purse-lipped manager, perennially disappointed in us, his ungrateful customers. “Labour is under new management,” he declared last summer. At times today, it felt as though we were sitting through the best speech ever delivered by the head of the Crown Prosecution Service. But a politician’s speech, reading the mood of the moment or weaving his own story into that of the country? Not that.
Leave aside the obvious irony of the party of Labour bragging about its managerial “competence”, it is badly out of sync with both the realities and the rhetoric of the “fuck business” era. Starmer rules out nationalisations; the Tory government takes over yet another rail firm. A Survation poll presented at Brighton shows that 69% of potential Labour voters agree that “the economy is rigged against ordinary people”, while 74% want more public ownership of assets. These voters would run a mile from anything termed “radical”, but in practice those are the policies they pick. The mood for what the LSE professor Jonathan Hopkin terms “anti-system politics” is still very much alive. Sadly it is being served by Johnson’s Tories, not Starmer’s Labour.
