As Sir Keir Starmer passed his third “birthday” as Labour leader on Tuesday, there was no cake and no party. On a busy local elections campaign visit to Lancashire, he was determined to look forward and not back and this was a working day like any other.
But politics students at Burnley College had other ideas, and after a chat with the Leader of the Opposition they decided to mark the anniversary by giving him an impromptu round of applause and cheers.
Later that day, when Starmer attended a glittering dinner with King Charles at Windsor Castle, alongside guests including Gareth Southgate and various ambassadors, he allowed himself if not a celebration at least a sense of how far he had travelled since succeeding Jeremy Corbyn.
Starmer often says that being Labour leader is a bit like being England manager, with everyone having an opinion on your progress on one of the toughest jobs in the business. What goes unsaid maybe is a belief that he gets little of the praise when his team is doing well and all of the blame when it isn’t.
As a keen amateur player as well as a football fan, Starmer is also a “confidence player”, one who needs to score goals to stay happy. With his party still maintaining a healthy lead in the opinion polls, with a substantial membership and donations flooding in, he has reason to claim progress from when he took over in April 2020.
The first task he set himself of changing Labour has undeniably been achieved. Just how far he’s come was underlined at a recent meeting of the national executive committee, where he proposed the motion banning Corbyn from standing as a Labour MP.
Leftwinger Andy Kerr, of the CWU postal union, told Starmer via Zoom call how appalled he was at the proposal. “I voted for Andy Burnham [in 2015] but Jeremy earned my respect,” Kerr said. “Keir, you will never earn my respect.” But at that point, NEC chair, Jo Baxter, simply muted him. As he railed silently but impotently, some in the room felt it was the perfect metaphor for the party’s Left under Starmer.
Starmer waived his right of reply and simply ordered an immediate move to a vote, which he won by a big margin. “He’s definitely learned on the job, become more of a political fist fighter,” one Shadow Cabinet minister says. “A year ago he wouldn’t have proposed that motion. When we did the big rule changes [in 2021] he didn’t even speak. He now knows he’s got to be rolling up his sleeves.”
One key aide adds: “The way to measure progress in the Labour Party is to measure the length of NEC meetings. We used to do eight hour NEC meetings and Keir couldn’t leave because votes were tricky. He had to sit in there while they just threw abuse at him.”
**Shedding ‘the skin’ of Corbynism**
Moving the London party HQ from Victoria to Blackfriars is also seen by allies as “a shedding of the old skin” of the Corbyn years. Staff complained about working on different floors and about he malfunctioning lavatories. “The toilets didn’t flush, the stink of piss didn’t smell of ‘winner’,” says one. “Three meeting rooms on the second floor couldn’t be used because they smelled of poo,” said another.
More importantly, Starmer and his team stress just how different the culture of the party is now. One aide points out that Corbyn’s ill-fated Labour Live music festival cost £1m – “about the same as we now spend on 70 trainee organisers in key seats for a whole year”.
Aides claim that well-off, privately educated left-wingers who were part of the Corbyn project – comms chiefs Seumas Milne and James Schneider, Unite’s Andrew Murray, Momentum’s Jon Lansman – didn’t have “skin in the game” of the impact of losing an election.
“Labour was just a fashion accessory to them, it was their political Gucci bag. Keir came along and told these people this party doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to the working people of this country and I will give it back to them.”
Many on the Left certainly felt their criticisms of him were vindicated when Starmer was trailing Boris Johnson in the polls, with the nadir coming with the loss of the Hartlepool by-election just two years ago.
Starmer has since confided that defeat was “like being punched in the stomach” but says he now thinks “it’s good that it hurt” because it forced him to double down on reforming his party.
Back in Hartlepool this week, he was delighted to have won over fisherman Stan Rennie, a 2019 Tory voter who feels “lied to” about Brexit’s benefits. “I was a little bit apprehensive, but he’s very down to earth, very approachable,” Rennie said. “I’m sure he’ll do the right thing for the country.”
Selections of parliamentary candidates have been dispatched ruthlessly to weed out anyone who may embarrass the party, a process some trade unions and even “soft left” activists have complained has been too factional.
Allies counter that Starmer’s surprise decision to offer his resignation if charged over alleged “Beergate” lockdown rule breaking, taking on the tabloids and his internal critics, proved he is “at his best when he’s boldest”.
The Labour leader has certainly been lucky with some of his opponents over the past three years, with Johnson’s partygate, Truss’s financial chaos and this week the SNP appearing to implode. Each of his enemies has inflicted huge damage on themselves.
Yet Starmer’s team say that he has “made his own luck” too. His forensic approach to Partygate, Labour’s seizing immediately on Truss’s unfunded tax cuts, installing Anas Sarwar as leader in Scotland, all allowed him to capitalise when his rivals stumbled.
Still, Starmer himself repeatedly opens his Shadow Cabinet meetings with warnings against “complacency” and his team are alive to the fact that the Conservatives’ formidable election winning machine can spring into action again despite the Government’s difficulties.
Despite October 2024 being pencilled in Tory MPs’ diaries for the next election date, Labour is braced for polling day to be next May at the latest. “Anytime between now and January 2025, if they get within five points [of Labour], or even under 10, they may call it,” one aide said. With plenty of voters still “undecided”, the Tories see their revival in pulling the waverers back into the fold.
**Missions impossible?**
For Starmer, the key to winning over the undecideds is to set out a vision of a transformative Labour government. His “Five Missions” – to change the economy, NHS, crime, clean energy and barriers to opportunity – are intended to do just that.
But the idea, seen as the brainchild of former Tony Blair adviser Peter Hyman, has sparked criticism internally.
One senior shadow minister marched into the Opposition Chief Whip’s office recently and complained: “Where’s my bloody mission then?” An insider said: “Some of them are close to a work-to-rule, they’re so pissed off.”
A more serious worry is the detail of the “missions”, with targets seen as either too ambitious or too detailed. Referring to a pledge to get the highest growth in the G7, one Labour figure said: “Everyone wants f****** growth, but how are you going to get it?”
“The crime one was a shit show, with key decisions not sorted until just days beforehand,” one staffer said. An MP put their finger on wider worries about pledges like halving violent crime: “I get that some of them are meant to be ‘stretch’ targets, but what happens when we don’t deliver? We won’t stretch, we will snap our credibility.”
A shadow minister said the real problem was that totting up all the spending pledges meant “a f****** £700bn price tag”. “In theory, we are only committed to £280bn over 10 years but the climate investment pledge can’t pay for everything we’ve said on Northern Powerhouse Rail or full HS2 – we are committed to both.”
“He was getting all this ‘what’s your vision? what’s your vision?’. But we have panicked and course-corrected way too far the other way,” one frontbencher said. “The Tories will be hoovering up everything we are saying on each of these “missions” and their ‘interventions’, we are just giving them a bank of stuff they can hammer us on when we get into government.”
One aide even compared Hyman, who goes by the catch-all title of “senior adviser”, to a blue-skies thinker in TV’s The Thick of It. “He’s a bit like Julius Nicholson, roaming around in a role not well defined, he can pop up anywhere, but these “missions” are a classic example of not integrating strategy and comms.”
“It feels like territory Ed [Miliband] got into with Torsten [Bell, his adviser], with the wonks setting strategy and comms, and we all remember the ‘Ed Stone’,” one staffer said. “The problem with these “missions” is you’ve got to be prepared to get through the first ten questions from Julie Etchingham in a live TV debate. I’m not sure they do that.
“It doesn’t feel like the one person who knows how to deliver big Civil Service agendas, Sue Gray, has been consulted about any of this stuff. God knows what she’ll think when she gets here. The Hyman strategy may crumble in the first few days we get in office and everyone’s asking Keir which bit of HS2 are you going to scrap? Which nuclear power station won’t go ahead?”
Most insiders are however prepared to give the “missions” idea the benefit of the doubt. One Shadow Cabinet minister said: “There’s a bit of grumbling but I think it’s a very useful framework for all of us to unite around. The idea is sound and more than serviceable. And the key is Keir is confident about selling it because he believes it.”
An MP added: “He did a whole ‘I believe in missions, not vision’ thing to the PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party] in the summer. This is part of that.” Another says the Labour leader is often telling his team he’s “outcomes focused” and that he can’t bear critics who are brilliant at describing a problem without coming up with a solution.
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As Sir Keir Starmer passed his third “birthday” as Labour leader on Tuesday, there was no cake and no party. On a busy local elections campaign visit to Lancashire, he was determined to look forward and not back and this was a working day like any other.
But politics students at Burnley College had other ideas, and after a chat with the Leader of the Opposition they decided to mark the anniversary by giving him an impromptu round of applause and cheers.
Later that day, when Starmer attended a glittering dinner with King Charles at Windsor Castle, alongside guests including Gareth Southgate and various ambassadors, he allowed himself if not a celebration at least a sense of how far he had travelled since succeeding Jeremy Corbyn.
Starmer often says that being Labour leader is a bit like being England manager, with everyone having an opinion on your progress on one of the toughest jobs in the business. What goes unsaid maybe is a belief that he gets little of the praise when his team is doing well and all of the blame when it isn’t.
As a keen amateur player as well as a football fan, Starmer is also a “confidence player”, one who needs to score goals to stay happy. With his party still maintaining a healthy lead in the opinion polls, with a substantial membership and donations flooding in, he has reason to claim progress from when he took over in April 2020.
The first task he set himself of changing Labour has undeniably been achieved. Just how far he’s come was underlined at a recent meeting of the national executive committee, where he proposed the motion banning Corbyn from standing as a Labour MP.
Leftwinger Andy Kerr, of the CWU postal union, told Starmer via Zoom call how appalled he was at the proposal. “I voted for Andy Burnham [in 2015] but Jeremy earned my respect,” Kerr said. “Keir, you will never earn my respect.” But at that point, NEC chair, Jo Baxter, simply muted him. As he railed silently but impotently, some in the room felt it was the perfect metaphor for the party’s Left under Starmer.
Starmer waived his right of reply and simply ordered an immediate move to a vote, which he won by a big margin. “He’s definitely learned on the job, become more of a political fist fighter,” one Shadow Cabinet minister says. “A year ago he wouldn’t have proposed that motion. When we did the big rule changes [in 2021] he didn’t even speak. He now knows he’s got to be rolling up his sleeves.”
One key aide adds: “The way to measure progress in the Labour Party is to measure the length of NEC meetings. We used to do eight hour NEC meetings and Keir couldn’t leave because votes were tricky. He had to sit in there while they just threw abuse at him.”
**Shedding ‘the skin’ of Corbynism**
Moving the London party HQ from Victoria to Blackfriars is also seen by allies as “a shedding of the old skin” of the Corbyn years. Staff complained about working on different floors and about he malfunctioning lavatories. “The toilets didn’t flush, the stink of piss didn’t smell of ‘winner’,” says one. “Three meeting rooms on the second floor couldn’t be used because they smelled of poo,” said another.
More importantly, Starmer and his team stress just how different the culture of the party is now. One aide points out that Corbyn’s ill-fated Labour Live music festival cost £1m – “about the same as we now spend on 70 trainee organisers in key seats for a whole year”.
Aides claim that well-off, privately educated left-wingers who were part of the Corbyn project – comms chiefs Seumas Milne and James Schneider, Unite’s Andrew Murray, Momentum’s Jon Lansman – didn’t have “skin in the game” of the impact of losing an election.
“Labour was just a fashion accessory to them, it was their political Gucci bag. Keir came along and told these people this party doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to the working people of this country and I will give it back to them.”
Many on the Left certainly felt their criticisms of him were vindicated when Starmer was trailing Boris Johnson in the polls, with the nadir coming with the loss of the Hartlepool by-election just two years ago.
Starmer has since confided that defeat was “like being punched in the stomach” but says he now thinks “it’s good that it hurt” because it forced him to double down on reforming his party.
Back in Hartlepool this week, he was delighted to have won over fisherman Stan Rennie, a 2019 Tory voter who feels “lied to” about Brexit’s benefits. “I was a little bit apprehensive, but he’s very down to earth, very approachable,” Rennie said. “I’m sure he’ll do the right thing for the country.”
Selections of parliamentary candidates have been dispatched ruthlessly to weed out anyone who may embarrass the party, a process some trade unions and even “soft left” activists have complained has been too factional.
Allies counter that Starmer’s surprise decision to offer his resignation if charged over alleged “Beergate” lockdown rule breaking, taking on the tabloids and his internal critics, proved he is “at his best when he’s boldest”.
The Labour leader has certainly been lucky with some of his opponents over the past three years, with Johnson’s partygate, Truss’s financial chaos and this week the SNP appearing to implode. Each of his enemies has inflicted huge damage on themselves.
Yet Starmer’s team say that he has “made his own luck” too. His forensic approach to Partygate, Labour’s seizing immediately on Truss’s unfunded tax cuts, installing Anas Sarwar as leader in Scotland, all allowed him to capitalise when his rivals stumbled.
Still, Starmer himself repeatedly opens his Shadow Cabinet meetings with warnings against “complacency” and his team are alive to the fact that the Conservatives’ formidable election winning machine can spring into action again despite the Government’s difficulties.
Despite October 2024 being pencilled in Tory MPs’ diaries for the next election date, Labour is braced for polling day to be next May at the latest. “Anytime between now and January 2025, if they get within five points [of Labour], or even under 10, they may call it,” one aide said. With plenty of voters still “undecided”, the Tories see their revival in pulling the waverers back into the fold.
**Missions impossible?**
For Starmer, the key to winning over the undecideds is to set out a vision of a transformative Labour government. His “Five Missions” – to change the economy, NHS, crime, clean energy and barriers to opportunity – are intended to do just that.
But the idea, seen as the brainchild of former Tony Blair adviser Peter Hyman, has sparked criticism internally.
One senior shadow minister marched into the Opposition Chief Whip’s office recently and complained: “Where’s my bloody mission then?” An insider said: “Some of them are close to a work-to-rule, they’re so pissed off.”
A more serious worry is the detail of the “missions”, with targets seen as either too ambitious or too detailed. Referring to a pledge to get the highest growth in the G7, one Labour figure said: “Everyone wants f****** growth, but how are you going to get it?”
“The crime one was a shit show, with key decisions not sorted until just days beforehand,” one staffer said. An MP put their finger on wider worries about pledges like halving violent crime: “I get that some of them are meant to be ‘stretch’ targets, but what happens when we don’t deliver? We won’t stretch, we will snap our credibility.”
A shadow minister said the real problem was that totting up all the spending pledges meant “a f****** £700bn price tag”. “In theory, we are only committed to £280bn over 10 years but the climate investment pledge can’t pay for everything we’ve said on Northern Powerhouse Rail or full HS2 – we are committed to both.”
“He was getting all this ‘what’s your vision? what’s your vision?’. But we have panicked and course-corrected way too far the other way,” one frontbencher said. “The Tories will be hoovering up everything we are saying on each of these “missions” and their ‘interventions’, we are just giving them a bank of stuff they can hammer us on when we get into government.”
One aide even compared Hyman, who goes by the catch-all title of “senior adviser”, to a blue-skies thinker in TV’s The Thick of It. “He’s a bit like Julius Nicholson, roaming around in a role not well defined, he can pop up anywhere, but these “missions” are a classic example of not integrating strategy and comms.”
“It feels like territory Ed [Miliband] got into with Torsten [Bell, his adviser], with the wonks setting strategy and comms, and we all remember the ‘Ed Stone’,” one staffer said. “The problem with these “missions” is you’ve got to be prepared to get through the first ten questions from Julie Etchingham in a live TV debate. I’m not sure they do that.
“It doesn’t feel like the one person who knows how to deliver big Civil Service agendas, Sue Gray, has been consulted about any of this stuff. God knows what she’ll think when she gets here. The Hyman strategy may crumble in the first few days we get in office and everyone’s asking Keir which bit of HS2 are you going to scrap? Which nuclear power station won’t go ahead?”
Most insiders are however prepared to give the “missions” idea the benefit of the doubt. One Shadow Cabinet minister said: “There’s a bit of grumbling but I think it’s a very useful framework for all of us to unite around. The idea is sound and more than serviceable. And the key is Keir is confident about selling it because he believes it.”
An MP added: “He did a whole ‘I believe in missions, not vision’ thing to the PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party] in the summer. This is part of that.” Another says the Labour leader is often telling his team he’s “outcomes focused” and that he can’t bear critics who are brilliant at describing a problem without coming up with a solution.