How does a Labour leader going into an election with only around 200 MPs to his name become prime minister? Well, the conventional answer is that he doesn’t, as Neil Kinnock demonstrated in 1987. Kinnock stuck around for a second go in 1992, but still couldn’t get over the line. We can tell from Sir Keir Starmer’s utterances this week that he is not really a sticking around type of bloke. We can also tell that he has identified a path to Downing Street that, while rocky and full of potential pitfalls, might just be navigable.
In his audacious conference speech on Tuesday, Starmer explicitly set himself a punishing goal – to take Labour into power at the next election, removing its frontbench team from ‘the shadows’ and catapulting it into government. Labour had had three ‘winners’ he said – name-checking Attlee, Wilson and Blair – and he intended to be the fourth.
Not only was the record of Jeremy Corbyn trashed before our eyes but so, at least implicitly, were the records of Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, the two other recent Labour leaders who managed to lose elections after inheriting far more favourable positions than has Starmer.
The affable Miliband won’t mind, even though Starmer’s speech was being made in the environs of his own Doncaster constituency. The brooding Brown probably will. No matter. For while Starmer is not a Blairite, he is clearly adopting the Blair method of opposition. And that should worry the Tories a lot.
Anything that is a drag on Labour’s election prospects that can be dispensed with is going to be dispensed with. Like Blair before him, Starmer seemed almost to relish confronting his party with the hard truth that it has been remarkably unsuccessful in elections for the vast majority of its history.
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