Sir Keir Starmer has many strengths, but earthy dynamism is not one of them. In Aesop’s fables, he is the wily and purposeful tortoise, not the fun and speedy hare. His temperament will not change — politicians rarely do — but over the coming weeks there will be new tests for the man who would be prime minister.
One of the very few assets a bedraggled (literally yesterday) prime minister has at his disposal is the shock effect of calling an election at short notice. Labour has seen this coming — bumping into a key member of Starmer’s team in Washington DC a month ago, I was surprised to find him edgily on alert and under instructions to have his phone on loud, day and night.
That turned out to be a wise precaution. Starmer was well prepared for the starting gun — a coherent instant statement on his desire to “stop the chaos” and steady delivery, flanked by two Union flags, one extra for the emergency situation that a modern Labour leader should get caught without a flag to hand.
But the campaign will be fire and fury, not just a repetitious run of “enough is enough” Labour talking points. One thing that a leader will need as the fight intensifies is a sense of pace and resilience, as well as diligence.
I suspect Tory advisers were behind the black door arguing over whether an umbrella would make the PM look privileged
Although this early vote is clearly a Hail Mary from Rishi Sunak, who has a vanishingly small chance of closing the 20-point gap, or even avoiding annihilation on July 4, there are some arrows in the Tory quiver.
A sore point Sunak was probing in his statement was something Labour has had difficulty in shaking off — namely that it is not really clear what it will do, because it is also unclear what many senior people in its ranks believe. If your party elected Jeremy Corbyn as leader in 2016, do not be surprised if people have reasonable doubts about that party being a stable centrist entity.
Starmer has sought to purge this memory but recall many of his own policy remedies when he first ran for leader — from sweeping nationalisations of “rail, mail, energy, water” to being against “outsourcing the NHS, local government and justice”.
That is wildly at odds with the cautious manifesto on which he sits today, but the explanation of why he changed his views has never been forthcoming.
He is not alone. Many of his front bench — Angela Rayner and David Lammy to name but two — have had hokey-cokey positions on the nuclear deterrent, which looks even more reckless in retrospect. It does not take a brilliant negative campaigning guru to foresee that Conservative researchers will have much more of this stuff to fling at Labour in the next few weeks.
So what looks like a settled field of play on day one can easily sound less certain under the shot and shell of battle. Labour’s ditching of its £28 billion green energy annual expenditure pledge left a puzzling hole between its ambitions for national transformation and the credible means to achieve it. Most Labour MPs sound hopelessly at a loss talking about realistic plans to restore growth — or how to overhaul services without raising taxation.
Again, we do not need to give the Government the benefit of the doubt on erratic economic management — and the crazier parts of the Liz Truss interregnum — to see that there are a few pretty big targets here for the Tories to take a kick at. Interviewing Starmer not long ago on his foreign policy outlook, I was struck by the amount of notes he brought and consulted, as if leafing through barrister briefs. Crab-like incrementalism and preparation have worked out for him — but that approach is easier to practise on the sidelines than in the limelight.
People will ask him things in the campaign that he has not been able to prepare for, or when he is overloaded and tired. Many in Labour’s experienced echelons, including Sue Gray, his redoubtable chief of staff and chief enforcer, worry about the varying levels of knowledge and understanding of Labour policies among MPs and activists and the need for “message discipline” not going awry.
It will, likely, all work out fine (at least fine enough to get him to his goal). A tired and chaotic Tory party will be hard put to fight a rear-guard action. But the pace of events and unpredictability of the road to election day is a test. When the election bell sounded wetly in Downing Street yesterday, Keir Starmer looked robust and respectable but stiff. From now on there will be punches — the question will be how he rolls with them.
