As much of the world’s attention was focussed on Israel and Gaza this week, the man who is likely to be Britain’s next Prime Minister was giving a speech at the annual conference of the Labour Party, which may have been the last before a general election. Keir Starmer is the sixty-one-year-old Leader of the Opposition, a post he has held since 2020. After a protester ran onstage and showered him with glitter, Starmer calmly dusted himself off, removed his jacket, and promised to lead “a decade of national renewal” in a country that, in recent years, has been through a lot: Brexit and its aftermath, the COVID-19 pandemic, a recession, stubbornly high inflation, falling living standards, and the calamitous premierships of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
A recent poll average showed Labour leading the Conservatives, who have been the primary governing party in Britain since 2010, by seventeen points. Under the British system, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak can call an election for any date between now and January, 2025, and commentators are flagging next May or October as likely options. The main theme of Starmer’s speech was that Labour, after thirteen years out of power, is ready to take charge and has workable plans to get the country going. New transport links, new homes, new towns, new green-energy projects, a modernized, more efficient National Health Service—Starmer said that a Labour government would build all of these things. He didn’t go so far as to adopt Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” slogan from 2020, but he did pledge to “unleash the ‘big build.’ ” In fact, he used the words “build” or “built” nineteen times.
Starmer’s second theme, a bit more subliminal, was that after all the turmoil and Sturm und Drang in recent years, Britain badly needs a period of calm, stability, and unspectacular hard work, and that even though he isn’t the most exciting politician in the world, he’s a competent, no-nonsense leader who embodies these virtues. Discussing the consequences of more than a decade of Conservative government, Starmer sounded like someone about to take power in the wake of a war or a national disaster. “I have to warn you: our way back from this will be hard,” he said. “But know this—what is broken can be repaired. What is ruined can be rebuilt.”
Starmer is a former human-rights lawyer. From 2008 to 2013, he served as Director of Public Prosecutions, which is the rough equivalent of heading the U.S. Justice Department’s criminal division. Among the cases his agency prosecuted was a notorious murder of a Black teen-ager, Stephen Lawrence, by white youths that took place in southeast London in 1993. In 2014, Starmer was knighted for his legal services, and the following year he was elected as a Labour M.P., subsequently serving as shadow Immigration Secretary and shadow Brexit Secretary under the opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, a veteran left-winger. Shortly after the general election of 2019, in which Labour recorded its worst result since 1935, with the Party losing many parliamentary seats in working-class areas that it had held for generations, Corbyn resigned. Starmer was elected as the new Party leader.
For a long time, much of Westminster and Fleet Street wrote him off as a plodding lawyer who was too lacking in charisma to lead his party back to power. Even commentators who were more sympathetic sometimes complained that he lacked an overarching vision. Now there is a reappraisal going on. This week, a Financial Times columnist compared Starmer’s feat in turning Labour around to the remaking of Microsoft in the Internet era and likened his political rise to those of Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump. Actually, Starmer isn’t a Macron, who created his own party from scratch, or a Trump, who created (or discovered) a movement and used it to steamroll the G.O.P. But in remaking the Labour Party from the inside and repositioning it on more centrist ground, he has proved to be an effective, and sometimes ruthless, political operator.
The basic challenge he has faced, one of his supporters told me, was disassociating Labour from the “ultra-leftism” associated with Corbyn. Starmer accomplished this, in part, by suspending the former leader over his reaction to an independent report that criticized the Labour Party for failing to take seriously allegations of antisemitism during his tenure. Despite the report, Corbyn said that his opponents had “dramatically overstated” the problem. Subsequently, the Party leadership banned him from standing as a Labour M.P. at the next election. Starmer and his allies also sidelined Corbyn supporters from other positions in the Party. On the policy front, Labour rowed back on some of its previous spending pledges, and the shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, a former Bank of England economist, promised that a Labour government would adhere to strict fiscal rules, including a pledge to reduce the national debt as a percentage of G.D.P.
Combined with the many pratfalls by the ruling Conservatives, which peaked in Truss’s short and disastrous tenure in 10 Downing Street, Labour’s shift to the center was sufficient to propel it to its large lead in the polls and Starmer to his position as a potential Prime Minister. In that exposed spot, he has so far proved to be adept at avoiding banana skins. During his speech at the conference, which he delivered days after Hamas’s attack on Israel, he reaffirmed the Labour Party’s long-standing support for an independent Palestinian state but bookended that statement with a robust condemnation of “senseless murder of men, women, and children” by “the terrorists of Hamas,” and an assertion that “Israel must always have the right to defend her people.” This formulation annoyed some people on the left. But it also must have irked the editors of Britain’s right-wing tabloids, who surely would have loved to give Starmer the same treatment they meted out to Corbyn by depicting him as a terrorist sympathizer.
Starmer is harder to pigeonhole. His proposals to speed up the transformation from fossil fuels and provide subsidies for green-energy jobs owe a good deal to the Biden Administration’s activist industrial policies. His pledge to remove zoning restrictions on house-building and speed up planning applications for major construction projects have a more laissez-faire bent. Both policies are intended to boost the British economy’s growth rate, which has been very modest ever since the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08. “Not state control, not pure free markets,” Starmer said in his speech. “But a genuine partnership, sleeves rolled up, working for the national interest.”
Going on the offensive, Starmer mocked Sunak, the fifth Tory Prime Minister in little more than seven years, as an out-of-touch politician, and he appealed to Conservative voters, saying that if they wanted a party that conserved the environment, the law, and the British union, they should support Labour. This reaching across party lines evoked memories of Tony Blair. Sure enough, Starmer appeared onstage this summer with Blair, who led Labour to an unprecedented three election victories but subsequently turned into a pariah on the left because of his support for the Iraq War and his lucrative post-Westminster career as an international political consultant.
There are some obvious parallels between Starmer and Blair. They are both former barristers who took over the Labour Party after a series of election defeats and tried to make it more electable. But there are also important differences. Starmer is older than Blair was when he became Party leader, less flashy and messianic and more solidly rooted in the working class: his mother was a nurse, his father a toolmaker. In his speech, he sought to reclaim the mantle of honest toil, patriotism, and national unity for himself and his party. He talked about the modest semi-detached house he grew up in and his summer vacations in the Lake District. He spoke of his sister, who is a care worker, and all the other care workers who worked night and day during the pandemic only to receive little reward.
Ultimately, however, his message was one that transcended class, economics, and party politics: Britain can do better. “I believe this country respects itself,” Starmer said. “I believe the British people respect each other. And I believe that if people see that respect, see that service in their politics, then they will commit to the mission of national renewal.” As things stand, it looks like Starmer will get a chance to test this theory. ♦
