There’s never much va-va-voom about Keir Starmer’s rhetoric, which is heavily dependent on well-trodden metaphor. After the “sunlight of hope” when he arrived in Downing Street and things “getting worse before they get better” when the new Government had to level with voters about the scale of its task, the Starmer speechwriters opted for another boilerplate classic: the “light at the end of the tunnel”.
Given that this was his first speech to Labour conference as Prime Minister, he could be forgiven for a bit of jubilation. He got that over in the first three minutes. No one watching Starmer could doubt that they were watching an earnest, diligent figure who had worked hard for victory.
But he also took the stage after weeks of unforced errors over donations and infighting in his inner team, somehow on the back foot while promising the great leap forward.
In the manner of an Old Testament prophet turning up with woeful tidings, the veteran pollster Sir John Curtice emerged with a dire prediction of Labour’s outlook, highlighting the shallow nature of the overall majority on a historically low share of the vote. “Consequently,” Curtice concluded dourly, “the pool of voters willing to give it the benefit of the doubt is unusually small.”
That message lurks uneasily beneath the celebratory mood in Liverpool as Starmer has watched his popularity ratings tank and a querulous mood in his own ranks over cuts to pensioner’s winter fuel allowances.
There is something of the Boxer on Animal Farm about Starmer’s response to adversity: his response is invariably to keep on slogging through the hard yards of rhetoric, while the sirens sound.
He went through some pretty niche, if important, promises of legislation – on welfare fraud, chasing down rogue contracts awarded to supply kit in the pandemic and an opposition to immigration to solve the country’s woeful shortage of labour (labour of the sort that does the work, rather than makes the speeches).
The thought processes can be elusive: were the “millions of young people, ambitious and highly talented, who are desperate to work” really failing to get work because of immigrant labour?
This was a proposition which would once have been pinned squarely on the more protectionist wing of the Conservatives. It has travelled leftwards without much scrutiny. So Starmer and Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, must now deliver a minor economic miracle, with (another) mystifying commitment to give out visas for some skilled workers – but not others. This one, as immigration-fixated Tories discovered, will run and run.
Time to blame the Tories for the “politics of easy answers”, and Starmer was on the firmer ground of reliable Labour outrage at the dimwittedness of Conservatives – admittedly with a fair amount of help from the out-gone government. Starmer took a lawyer’s scalpel to its record in a litany of woes on Rwanda plans that never delivered: “The state of our country is on them.”
The message was that from prisons, to child poverty and public finances, everything that could be better had got worse. But in the last eventful weeks, since the riots, there has been a sense that Starmer needs to offer more than the “destruction of bluster”. The solutions are “on him” now because the opposition is now just that – a faded legacy trapped in its own internal wrangles.
We were promised an era of innovation – but the vision still feels patchy. Great British Energy is the showcase project and based in Aberdeen (with an eye to trying to keep ahead of the SNP in mind). But the economic return is murky.
Ditto the cancellation of around £1.3bn of investment in tech and AI projects promised by the Tories, including the “super-computer” based in Edinburgh – which did not feature in a lengthy spiel about embracing future opportunities. Was it sacrificed to Rachel Reeves’s stringent targets (the Treasury version) or because it was not sufficiently AI-focused (the No 10 explanation)? There’s still a sense that when it comes to explaining decisions, or the “trade-offs” Starmer mentioned, the facts turn out to be hard to pin down.
As for the world outside the rapturous crowd who were buzzed to see the Labour leader with the words “Prime Minister” under his image, it’s safe to say that the emotional centre of Labour has moved from Ukraine to Gaza. The call for a ceasefire got the loudest cheer of the afternoon – after a stumble in reading the word “hostages” as “sausages”, which would be the funniest meme of the conference, were the context not so distressing.
We moved on swiftly from any troublesome detail about how the ceasefire might happen and headed to a laundry list of aspirations: the “NHS facing the future… safer streets in your community; stronger borders; more opportunities for your children; clean British energy… making our country more secure”.
One day, if bad AI training has its way, all political speeches will read like this. It is not that Starmer lacks commitment; he put across a seriousness about the job which shows that he will be an attentive and hard-working leader.
What was harder to figure out where his focus lies: leaders discover pretty soon that among the endless “to do” lists of a new government, what ministers, civil servants and ultimately voters seek is a sense of what a leader considers is most important or urgent.
Aneurin Bevan decreed that the “language of priorities” was the key to delivering socialism. Even without the -ism which does not speak its name in modern Labour politics, government is about choosing what matters most and putting the priorities in order. That might be the key to reviving the sense of “hope” Starmer desperately wanted to channel. Today felt like the warm-up act. Maybe next year.
Anne McElvoy is host of the Power Play podcast from POLITICO, which is out on Thursdays
