“Keir Starmer’s the luckiest man. He’s going to be Prime Minister. Even though he’s boring.” That’s what a former Labour MP told me as the Conservatives descended into chaos with the ousting of Boris Johnson.
It was the summer of 2022, and Labour had taken the lead in the polls. A lead which now hovers around 20% and implies a hefty majority for the man who only became an MP back in 2015.
He’s certainly been lucky. With an 80 seat majority, Johnson had seemed set to gift the Tories a decade in power. When Starmer was elected four years ago (the party plumping for yet another North London man despite calls for a first female leader), Labour was smarting from its worst defeat since 1935. It looked like he was taking on a ten year project to wrest the party back from the Corbynistas and convince voters Labour could be trusted with power.
How quickly times change.
“Keir Starmer’s the luckiest man. He’s going to be Prime Minister. Even though he’s boring.” That’s what a former Labour MP told me as the Conservatives descended into chaos with the ousting of Boris Johnson.
PA
The Labour poll lead is largely down to voters being thoroughly fed up with the Conservatives after 14 years in office. They’ve swapped one leader for another and another, presided over the highest tax burden in 70 years and public services are under acute strain.
Scarlett Maguire, Director at pollsters JL Partners, says voters tell her: “We don’t know what Keir Starmer stands for, we're not sure what the Labour Party stands for, but they must be better than what we've just had for the last 14 years, so we're going to give them a go.”
A current Labour MP recently joked “what policies?” about Labour’s offering. Labour’s five missions have not cut through like Sunak’s five (mostly unfulfilled) pledges.
And the Labour leader has been on quite a journey. He ran for leader on a platform of ten left wing pledges making, he said, the moral case for socialism.
Few of those pledges remain intact.
But Baroness Jenny Chapman, who was Starmer's political secretary, explains.“He's a pragmatist. So things that he said four years ago, before we left the European Union, before Covid, before the financial crisis that Liz Truss plunged us into as a country, before our mortgages all went through the roof….things you could say then, it's just not pragmatic or realistic to say the exact same things now.”
For all the many U-turns on policy, and being dubbed ‘Mr Flip-Flop’ by Sunak, he has changed Labour. His determination to root out the antisemitism that had surged under Corbyn led to a zero tolerance approach and quickly high profile figures being sacked (fellow leadership hopeful Rebecca Long-Bailey) or losing the whip, including Diane Abbott and even the man he replaced, Jeremy Corbyn.
It hasn’t been easy. When Labour lost the Hartlepool by-election in May 2021 Starmer came close to resigning. The ensuing reshuffle aimed to clip the wings of deputy leader Angela Rayner, but ended with her gaining a whole host of titles.
But as the Partygate scandal began to break, the Tories sank into infighting and as their poll rating plummeted, the Labour lead soared.
More recently, the war in Gaza has been problematic for Labour, and for Starmer, beginning with his disastrous interview on LBC where he said that Israel “did have that right” to withhold food, water and power from Gaza.
The conflict has led to rebellions, and the humiliation of George Galloway winning Rochdale. But Starmer is focused on acting like a prime minister in waiting. Hence the mirroring of the position of the government and the US.
Pollster Scarlett Maguire says: “We actually recently asked voters to describe Keir Starmer in a single word. And the most commonly used words were weak, uh, boring, unsure. Now, people also use words like honest and competent and leader, And I think one thing that we hear more and more from people is that actually, the more they see of him, at least they think he might be a little bit more, um, normal than Rishi Sunak.”
She adds: “One thing that Keir Starmer has managed to do is make himself and the party look like a safe option again, especially around issues like immigration and the economy.”
It’s easy to say Starmer has just got lucky.
And he has.
But as Maguire says, he’s changed Labour and made them not a scary proposition for voters. After Corbyn, that’s a big deal.
He’s mild mannered and perhaps easy to underestimate. But he’s driven and he wants to win.
Things can always change in politics, and fast.
But for now it looks like he will be our next Prime Minister. Whether he’s ‘boring’ or not.
And for many, after recent Conservative chaos, ‘boring’ may look like no bad thing.