Keir Starmer: ‘We haven’t won – yet’

When Keir Starmer won the Labour leadership in 2020, following the party’s worst election defeat since 1935, many people shook him by the hand, said ‘good luck’ and then added darkly ‘you’re not going to do it in five years’. Just three years later, he has done ‘it’, to the extent that Labour is 20 points ahead in the polls. The insult the Tories levelled at him when he became opposition leader – that he was boring – now looks like an advantage when it is offset by Conservative psycho-drama. Starmer clearly thinks things are going his way.

Actually, things aren’t going his way when we meet, because his train is delayed. He is trying to go to Slough to campaign, but all the trains out of Paddington are either running behind or cancelled. It’s not a strike day, which helps the Labour attack line that Britain is falling apart because of the Conservative government, not strikes. He waits on the platform with Rachel Reeves, his shadow chancellor, with whom he has just returned from the World Economic Forum in Davos.

His Slough visit, no less cold nor indeed less glamorous than Davos, is to Octopus Energy, a company Starmer and Reeves admire. It is a bizarre backdrop for a photocall: Starmer, a rather grey figure, ends up standing in front of hundreds of hot pink fluffy octopus toys which are scattered around the warehouse. One extra large octopus perches behind him on a copper boiler pipe while he does broadcast interviews. To greet Reeves and Starmer, Octopus Energy placed a framed picture of the two of them on the coffee table in a model home. The pair are amused, but also pleased with the idea that Labour and business are now so close.