When we interviewed Sir Keir Starmer three years ago on the eve of his first party conference as Labour leader, he declared: “We have a mountain to climb.”
It was a mountain so big that many thought he could not possibly scale it. Thanks to the magnitude of the party’s 2019 election defeat, few Labour people then believed that such an electoral Everest would look conquerable three years later. When we ask him how far up the mountain Labour has ascended, Starmer can reply with credibility: “We can see the summit clearly now.” He quickly adds: “But we’ve got to keep climbing.” Labour meets for this week’s conference in Liverpool with a lot to celebrate. The party is jubilant about a convincing byelection victory in Scotland over the SNP. Rishi Sunak’s attempt to kickstart a Tory recovery at their conference in Manchester foundered in a swamp of self-inflicted mayhem, badly executed U-turns and frantic factional fighting, all things he was supposed to have put behind his party. Labour morale will be further boosted because the party has sustained a double-digit lead in the opinion polls since the implosion of Liz Truss’s calamitous premiership. The last thing you will get from Starmer, though, is any whiff of complacency. “It is not going to be giddy,” he says of the Liverpool gathering. “It’s not job done.” He warns his party that there is no time to take a breather. “If we are going to get from here to an election victory, we have to go up another gear.” Known to his friends as a fiercely competitive man who always wants to win, whether it is prosecuting in court or playing football or as a late adopter of a political career, he tells his party members that they have to raise their game still further. “Every single thing we do must be exceptional.”
He continues: “Every year of my leadership, we’ve had to go up a level and up a level, and we’re going to have to go up a level at this conference.” He defines success as showing Britain that Labour is: “Businesslike. Prepared. Ready, with a plan that will work.” On his account, Labour has progressed as far as it has because he had a “methodical” view from the start about how to turn around its fortunes. The first stage of his leadership was sorting out the party. “Ruthlessly take control, and without hesitation or equivocation, do the change we needed.” The second was making the case against the Conservatives. “Expose the Tories as not fit to govern.” The third phase of his leadership is the most critical of all: persuading the country that it needs and should desire a Labour government. “We’re coming to this conference bang on schedule,” he contends. “This is the conference we wanted at this stage of the journey and this is where we intend to answer that question ‘Why Labour?’ with confidence and a coherent plan.” It needs answering because pollsters report that many voters are still unsure what Starmer is really all about and are yet to be convinced Labour has a clear plan for the country. He has spent much of this year trying to address those doubts by unveiling his five “national missions”. “These are big things,” he says, perhaps a tad defensively. They are his riposte to the charge that he is not ambitious enough in how he wants to change Britain. It will be a “major, difficult achievement” to deliver the promise to get the UK growing faster than any other economy in the G7. It will be “really difficult” to keep the pledge that all our power generation will be green by 2030. Anyone who knows anything about the criminal justice system – and a former director of public prosecutions knows a lot – will understand that reform is a “major, major ambition”.
The complaint from a lot of Labour MPs is that the missions do not resonate with the public and have not armed the party with a “retail offer” for voters most interested in seeing improvements in their everyday lives. He asks for patience: “The retail comes as we get closer to the election. Pledge cards or their equivalent are always the way we need to go into the election. So I accept that challenge. We’ve thought that through. Of course, that will follow. But I don’t want to make the mistake of thinking that we can get to the pledge card before we have worked out in our mind how we’re going to actually achieve this. There is a huge difference between opposition and government, a huge difference between making a speech as an opposition MP and delivering in government.” The central critique of him from the left is that his determination to make his party less vulnerable to hostile fire from the Tories and his drive to make a Starmer government look like a safe choice for centrist voters have turned Labour into an ultra-cautious outfit devoid of much radicalism. He counters that the times require doing “the hard yards” to ensure that Labour does not promise things it will not be able to deliver. “I’m going to bombproof every single policy as we go forward,” he says. “If that means that there are tweaks along the way, but they’re the right tweaks, it means it’s deliverable, then that’s what we will do.”
The Tories charge that he is not so much the undogmatic pragmatist that he claims to be, but an unprincipled opportunist who will say anything in the pursuit of power. This one he laughs at: “The more they insult me, the more it’s a badge of honour.” But they are not wrong to say that he once called Jeremy Corbyn a “friend” and twice backed him to be prime minister before later deciding he was unfit even to be a Labour parliamentary candidate. “Look, Jeremy Corbyn was leader of our party and we’re a democratic party. We elected him as leader. But this party now is fundamentally different to the party in 2019. Jeremy Corbyn is not even a Labour MP. What was clear to me when we lost, in the way we lost in 2019, is you don’t look at the electorate and say ‘What on earth were you thinking?’ You look at your party and say ‘We need to change and fast.’” He talks like a man who doesn’t think he was given anything to fear by the Conservative conference in Manchester. “The 13th year of being in government should be a year where you’re able to stand at the platform and list the things you’ve done and invite the country to continue your governance on the basis of the record that you’ve got. They’re so way off that.” He warms to the subject, describing the Tories as “a party with no record to stand on, no leadership to be proud of, that’s run out of road and ideas. That’s led them to descend into conspiracy theories, populism, even making things up.” “Their last leader but one is now excluded from parliament for lying to it. Their last leader broke the economy. And their current leader is unelected.” He ridicules the idea that Sunak can pitch himself as the candidate of change. “Rishi is … right to say the last 13 years have been a complete failure, but he can’t be the change. He has been the nodding dog. He’s been the chancellor nodding through the decisions that he now claims are so bad that he’s got to change them. The change we need is from them.” He scorns Sunak for being too timid even to change his own party. “When is he going to say ‘Liz Truss can’t stand for the next election’? That would be bold change leadership. But he can’t go anywhere near that kind of change.”
Sunak received his loudest applause from the Tory crowd in Manchester when he lunged into the arguments about identity issues by baldly declaring: “A man is a man and a woman is a woman.” Does Starmer, whose own party has its divisions on the subject, agree? “Yes, of course,” he responds crisply and without qualification. “You know, a woman is a female adult.” That answer will delight some while dismaying those who regard the position as transphobic. He does not expand on the subject, claiming that the issue was “not raised with us” on doorsteps. Central to everything Labour hopes to achieve in government is resuscitating the economy. In conscious imitation of a successful Tony Blair slogan, he says his top three priorities will be “growth, growth, growth”. This will be the animating theme of the conference. “Growing the economy is number one. And to make sure it’s grown everywhere across the country, so not just turbocharging London and the south-east. Growth is the absolute focus of what we’re doing.” A Labour government would establish an industrial strategy council, reform planning law and turn the apprenticeship levy into “a growth and skills levy so that businesses can spend 50% of that money on courses that are not full apprenticeships”. During a visit to Hinkley Point to inspect the construction of its new nuclear power station, he was struck by the fact that they have “got more cranes than any other site in Europe, but they haven’t got enough crane drivers”. Some critics contend that Labour has undermined its growth prospectus by pushing back the commitment to invest £28bn a year in a green prosperity plan. “No,” he counters. “The goal is clean power for 2030. What matters is hitting that goal. The date you sign the cheque was never the goal.”
To a lot of people, including many in Labour, the obvious way for the UK to give itself an economic lift would be to rejoin the EU’s single market. But the man who was once among the most passionate opponents of Brexit dismisses that. Arguing that poor growth was already a feature of the economy before the rupture with the EU, he says: “If you simply get in the warm bath of saying it’s all about the EU, you are missing some fundamentals about strategic government, about skills, about investment.” The summit of the mountain may now be in sight, but he suggests that the last leg of the climb will be the most challenging. “There’s a long way to go yet. The battle has hardly begun in terms of this final part of the journey,” he cautions his party. “We need to show the country that we are the change.”