What Starmer still lacks

Keir Starmer has spent the hours since his successful conference speech lapping up the praise from party members, frontbench colleagues and business. He had the air of a man who had hit his stride when he appeared in the broadcast studios this morning, ridiculing questions about whether he was a bit boring by saying ‘if I came on and said I’ve done a bungee jump, you wouldn’t say “oh great, now we’ve got the prime minister we need”.’ You could hear his eye-roll as he said ‘bungee jump’ into the Today programme microphone.

But his broadcast round also showed how much more work the Labour leader needs to do before he gets the ultimate pat on the back of winning an actual election. It’s not so much dealing with the Rupa Huqs of this world – he told broadcasters that what Huq had said yesterday about Kwasi Kwarteng being ‘superficially’ black was ‘racist’ and he was glad the party had taken such swift action. In every party, there will always be MPs who reveal themselves to be unacceptable idiots and the test is how the party deals with them rather than whether they exist. It’s more that at the moment the not-a-bungee-jumper stuff is still Starmer’s main pitch. That works very well at the moment: boring and capable in the Labour party vs anything but boring and mildly terrifying in the Conservative government. It earns Starmer a hearing after his party has spent the best part of a decade being mildly terrifying to the electorate in a variety of different ways.

Starmer’s success this week has been to cement Labour as a party worth listening to, rather than sealing its election victory. He had to explain why he was backing some of the Tory tax cuts while also criticising them for being unfunded. The reason he was even asked this was that he and Rachel Reeves have placed so much emphasis on the importance of costing everything, which invites the media to pull at the threads of all policies. It makes it harder to announce big, imaginative and captivating ideas, which he will need in order to convince the public not just to listen to him, but to vote for his party.