Eyes on the Prize

On January 27, Sir Keir Starmer's Twitter feed carried a moving video of the Labour leader meeting Eva Clarke, who was born in a concentration camp and whose mother was one of survivors liberated from Auschwitz at the end of the Second World War. 

"She didn't have time to mourn either my father, or my brother, or all her family immediately after the war, because she said she just had to live for me," Clarke says. Her story is an extraordinary one. Shortly after she spoke with Starmer her meeting with the Labour leader was picked up across a host of national - and Jewish - newspapers.

In that video alone one can get the sense of Keir Starmer's turnaround of the Labour party. It is less than four years ago that many within the Jewish community were warning they might leave the country if the party won due to its treatment of Jewish members under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership. Yet, February's announcement that the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) watchdog had removed special measures - imposed on the party in 2020 after a wave of antisemitism allegations - indicates Labour has made significant headway tackling this issue. It's also something of a milestone moment for the party, a clear sign that Starmer has been successful changing the narrative around the party, edging it further down the path to government.

"The speed at which we [Labour] has moved is incredible," Labour backbencher Dame Margaret Hodge (who is a secular Jew) told BBC Radio 4's Today programme, noting it was making progress in other areas too. "The party is fundamentally transformed, our attitude to business, global regulation and NATO has all changed."

Starmer was in no mood to be complacent, however. "Be in no doubt: the job of restoring Labour is not complete," he said following the news. "I don't see today's announcement as the end of the road. I see it as a signpost that we are heading in the right direction."
 

How bad was it?

It's the antithesis to where the party was in December 2019 when it had just suffered its worst electoral defeat in 84 years. Voters abandoned the party in their thousands - and for many, it was Jeremy Corbyn that was to blame. The Tories painted him as nothing less than an enemy of the state - and he did little to challenge the narrative.

"It was like shooting fish in a barrel," one who worked on the Tory campaign told me recently. "He'd get annoyed and frustrated and lash out."

Corbyn's irritations with the media were legendary. He'd refuse to sit down with some national newspapers and by the end of the election cycle it's not too much to say that he was at war with the popular press. It might not be a world in which The Sun can say it's ‘wot won it' but as Corbyn has learned, you can't win an election based on positive coverage on fringe outlets like Novara media. 

By contrast Starmer has gone out of his way to speak with the press who turned against Corbyn so early on. He has written regularly for the Mail and Mail on Sunday - picking his interventions carefully, including middle-England-friendly post-Covid-19 calls to get kids back to school. 

Even the business press has been impressed, as Starmer uses his frontbench spokespeople as allies.

"Jeremy Corbyn would never have spoken to us, let alone said something we wanted to hear. But it was when he put Rachel Reeves into the job as Shadow Chancellor that there was this uptick in excitement around business journalists that Labour might want to engage - and to their credit, they have," says one prominent City hack. 

"Admittedly, the road has been made easier by the Tories having a mid-life crisis on the front pages." 
 

An easy road?

Starmer has been the beneficiary, too, of some extraordinary events on the opposite benches. 

"His predecessor was busy playing left-wing student politics and fanning the flames of antisemitism, while three successive Prime Ministers have insisted on making his life easier, week after week, scandal after scandal," another well-connected political spinner says. 

"Keir's strength has been displaying some basic competency and consistency, while in the background, opening the door of his party to the corporate world and showing Labour means business."

The charm offensive towards the City has been noticed by those in the Square Mile's boardrooms - and some were quietly impressed by Starmer and Reeves' willingness to turn up to Davos to talk up Britain. Rishi Sunak stayed at home, concerned about the optics - but from a PR perspective, for a government already struggling to keep business onside it felt like a real moment. Amanda Blanc, the highly regarded CEO of insurance giant Aviva, said the party and business had "the same motivations." Tesco's chair John Allan spoke at a Labour business event that corporate comms people prioritised over the Tories' business day at their conference. The mood music has a red tinge. 
 

The real test begins now

It's all very well looking competent compared to Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. The technocratic Rishi Sunak is a more difficult target, and will force Starmer and Reeves to offer something with a little more dynamism. They have so far successfully navigated the bear trap of ongoing strike action - where it is obvious that the leadership's motivation is to stay in line with the public mood rather than back the unions. Starmer's swift, bloodless firing of one of his MPs for standing on a picket line angered some on the left of his party but removed the Tories' ability to paint him as a firebrand.

Now, if the economy begins to turn around by the time of the next election, will technocracy and competence be enough for Starmer and Labour to win the seats they need to win in Scotland and ‘the Red Wall' to return to government? For now, the polls suggest it might be.