Project Keir-for-PM is not a hopeless cause — but it can’t afford to be dull one

Chat shows look like an easy win for Opposition leaders, anxious to gain a hearing in the years between defeat and the lengthy distance to the next election. They can also be revealing, as Keir Starmer has just discovered on the LBC show “Call Keir”. The cause of the fuss was Gemma, who started off talking about whether football players should take the knee — and morphed swiftly into racist fantasies.

All politicians know that sinking feeling on realising that they are dealing with someone whose views have jumped the rational shark. Poor Sir Keir might also have been thinking that he has enough on his plate dealing with stubborn conspiracy theorists on Labour’s far Left  without having to deal with a Right-wing one on air too.

But politics is about mastering the art of the unexpected and this was, as we now say in HR-speak, a moment for some “learnings”. So courteous was  Starmer that, having given a good straight answer on why he disagreed on the knee-taking, he missed the moment to say flatly that Gemma was talking dangerous nonsense, which then had to be said subsequently in a press release. It all looked terribly leaden-footed.  

Even more seasoned political batsmen have their off days: Tony Blair got  booed at the Women’s Institute, Gordon Brown was recorded calling a voter a “bigoted woman”, Boris Johnson shiftily refused to engage with a reporter confronting him about the conditions in a Leeds A&E in the last election campaign. But the pratfalls often hint at a specific weakness a politician needs to address. In Starmer’s case, a brutal up-sum of his record so far is that it feels earnest, sensible and a lot less crazy than what went before, but still less than the sum of its parts.  

His polling figures were good when the Government was at its most messy and incoherent — hence a surge in the early autumn.  

That has abated though, and while polling for Opposition parties is erratic so early in the electoral cycle, the priority for Starmer is to establish himself as a potential Prime Minister and that looks less certain.  

It is not because he has had a dull life (his Desert Island Discs stories of a childhood haunted by his mother’s serious illness and regrets over his failure to have a warmer relationship with his father was a gripping listen). Too often though, he looks a bit worried (in the sense of being anxious, rather than conscientious) and his body language can be uneasy (I would recommend yoga and a bit of drama training).

Shrewd enough to see that he needs a strong pivot towards the voter concerns which led to the Red Wall collapse in the old Labour strongholds like my native north-west Durham, he will need to combine that with a pragmatic reckoning on how post-Brexit Britain should seek to define itself and figuring out more clearly which battles to fight with Johnson. To claim  that you would have “negotiated a deal by now” naturally enough led to the question of which of the sticking points in the talks with the EU he would have given ground on.  And in the event of a possible deal, however “skinny” it may prove, it would be better for Labour to avoid predicting a  “failure of statecraft” which will look misplaced if a no deal is avoided in the next couple of weeks.  

High-end lawyerly skills are an excellent tool when it comes to filleting the Government’s lame record on the Covid-19 response.  

They are not, however, the full toolkit of persuasion and Starmer will also have to decide, as the months roll on, how to define his instincts more sharply for the more optimistic year of vaccine rollout — and the broader argument about economic revival.