Whatever happens next, Sir Keir Starmer will be remembered as a historically consequential Labour leader. In April 2020, he inherited a smoking ruin of a party that had suffered its worst election defeat since 1935, wrecked by Jeremy Corbyn’s disastrous leadership and stained by anti-Semitism. Three years on and, quite remarkably, he has brought Labour back to the brink of office.
Today, Labour is consistently 20 points ahead of the Conservatives in the opinion polls and — witness the fall of Dominic Raab — the governing party shows no sign of drawing a line under its long record of shambolic controversy.
Yet Starmer has not yet sealed the deal. To win a single-seat majority in the next general election, Labour needs a swing greater than that achieved by Margaret Thatcher in 1979.
What is still conspicuously lacking is a pulse-quickening sense of Starmer’s claim to be an aggressive and dynamic change-maker. Yes, inflation has been in double digits for seven consecutive months, and the IMF expects the UK’s growth this year to be the worst among advanced economies. But, as sensible as Starmer and his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves appear, they have yet to present an alternative economic plan that would clearly fire up the engines.
Yes, the Government’s policy on small boats and deportations to Rwanda is little more than performative cruelty. But how would Starmer as PM and Yvette Cooper as his home secretary combine basic decency to the wretched of the earth with a manageable border policy? Whether he likes it or not, he would inherit a political landscape horribly scarred by culture wars — but cannot yet say, definitively, what a woman is.
All of which is the broader context in which the disgrace of Diane Abbott should be properly considered. In a letter to The Observer this weekend, the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington denied that “Irish, Jewish and Traveller people” experience racism — being subject, she claimed, to the lesser evil of “prejudice”.
This was, of course, a classic example of the problem so brilliantly analysed in David Baddiel’s book Jews Don’t Count: the dangerous notion that there is a hierarchy of oppression, and that (for instance) the bigotry to which Jews are subjected reflects hostility to their religion rather than fully fledged racism. As Baddiel writes: “I’m an atheist and yet the Gestapo would shoot me tomorrow.”
Abbott has been suspended, and has apologised, claiming that the printed letter was a draft sent in error. Yesterday, Starmer acknowledged, quite rightly, that she “has suffered a lot of racial abuse over many, many years” but also insisted that “that doesn’t take away from the fact that I condemn the words she used and we must never accept the argument that there’s some sort of hierarchy of racism”.
Yet this is not enough. Though he is presently hiding behind the fact that an “investigation” is underway, it is absolutely essential that he makes clear that Abbott will not be a Labour candidate at the next election.
Why? Because he cannot afford to do otherwise. As the Tories have spotted, one of his greatest vulnerabilities is that less than four years ago he was campaigning for Corbyn to become prime minister and for Abbott to be a home secretary. Already, highly effective video compilations of Starmer’s “flip-floppng” are circulating online.
In addition to its intrinsic immorality, Labour’s record of racism against Jews was also more generally symbolic of its weirdness, its remoteness from reality and its ideological derangement. And all this was an issue very recently. Starmer cannot say often enough that this era of collective madness is over.
Much more is at stake, in other words, than the political fate of single party veteran. Anything other than absolute clarity on Abbott’s future relationship with Labour will be interpreted as sign of backsliding, dither and weakness. Such decisions may be difficult, but they are as nothing to what crosses the desk of a prime minister every day.
In nine days, Starmer faces his next political hurdle in the local elections — and will be judged a failure if Labour achieves net gains much below 1,000 seats. From now on, every such test will get progressively harder. As one of the prime ministers he hopes to succeed once said: this is no time to go wobbly.
