Amid all the frenetic changes of leadership in the Conservative party, something important has been overlooked about the Labour party: it also has a new leader. Outwardly nothing has changed. Keir Starmer – he of the slicked-back hair and strangulated vowels – still stands at the despatch box at PMQs each week. But he has been given an electoral personality transplant.
It is not that Starmer has become intrinsically more fluent or exciting (though one cannot fail to notice he has grown somewhat in confidence lately). Rather, it is his entire political persona that has been changed.
Where once he projected the world view of a leftist lawyer from chichi Camden Town – taking a knee for BLM, backing whiney Meghan and Harry, banging on about ‘structural racism’ – now he transmits a pocket Robocop vibe.
On congratulating Rishi Sunak for becoming PM, he noted that it showed Britain was a place where ethnic background was no barrier to reaching the highest office in the land and that was something of which the whole country could be proud.
Last week he eviscerated the Conservatives for failing to stop the Channel boats – a subject he had never dared to lead on before at PMQs.
Since then he has condemned the antics of Just Stop Oil in terms that would not have seemed out of place coming from the mouth of the outspoken Red Wall Tory Lee Anderson. When a clip of this landed on my Twitter timeline, I clicked on it expecting to hear the fence-sitting Starmer of old.
Instead there followed a full-throated denunciation of the Tamsin-and-Tarquin brigade disrupting the lives of working people:
‘Get up, go home, I’m opposed to what you are doing…that’s why we have wanted longer sentences for those who are gluing themselves and are stuck on roads. I think of all the people trying to get to work today…So I’m being really tough on them. I think they are totally wrong. Get up and go home.’
Starmer has also found time in recent days to fit in an attack on the notion that more migrant labour could be the answer to the NHS staffing crisis and float the idea of compulsory ID cards. As a long-time observer of him, I suspect these utterances do not reflect his genuine political ideas at all. Were he to get into power the metro-leftist inside him would surely re-emerge.
Instead, it looks like Starmer is being used as a cipher by a someone who actually understands the mindsets of the voters Labour needs to win back. Looking around his team of advisers, I suspect the Labour’s director of communications Matthew Doyle, a New Labour disciple of Peter Mandelson from back in the day, might be responsible. Doyle, or someone equally cunning, seems to have adopted as his mantra the famous opening sequence from the 1970s TV show The Six Million Dollar Man: ‘Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic politician.’
While all of this has been going on, Rishi Sunak and his handlers have been making mis-step after mis-step. A craven u-turn on what seemed like an impressively punchy decision to stay away from Cop27 was followed by a much-photographed love-in with France’s president Macron. This made the pair appear to be interchangeable swanky centrist technocrats. Then there was the spaffing of billions more UK taxpayers’ money on dodgy foreign regimes. Getting caught sneaking George Osborne in via the Downing Street back door as a prelude to the resumption of full-blown austerity ‘Osbornomics’ merely underlines the impression of a globalist superclass regaining control of Britain.
Support from Sunak for Home Secretary Suella Braverman after her description of an ‘invasion’ of the coast of southern England has meanwhile been lukewarm to say the least. This is reminiscent of his ‘I wouldn’t have said it’ response when Boris Johnson taunted Starmer over the CPS failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile.
But out in the Red Wall, where the next election will be won and lost, they appreciate plain speaking. Polling research commissioned by the More In Common group and published in the Times this week shows that the Tory failure to curb excessive immigration – both legal and illegal – is a huge vote-shifter in such constituencies.
Team Starmer have stopped giving the Conservatives a free run on such issues. Team Sunak, meanwhile, apparently thinks it sufficient to utter handwringing laments about there being ‘no easy answers’. In the Johnson-Patel era, the Conservatives were guilty of over-promising and under-delivering on immigration control. But Sunak replacing that combination with one of under-promising and under-delivering will not end well for him.
A fortnight into his Downing Street tenure is far too early to write Sunak off. But right now, Starmer is the one projecting a winning electoral personality.
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