Of all the people Keir Starmer should meet on a bank holiday visit to Blackpool, it was a former neighbour from decades ago who wanted to chat about Kentish Town.
Starmer and Carol Morgan, visiting from Potters Bar, had a really warm, nostalgic chat about house numbers and where they had lived in relation to the local swimming pool as the Labour leader ordered ice-creams.
Would she be voting for him, she was asked afterwards. “No,” she replied. “I mean he’s a very nice man, but … no.”
Later, in an interview, Starmer denied that there were still too many voters like Morgan, wary and unsure of who the real Keir Starmer was.
“Look at the progress we’ve made,” he said. “Just over three years ago, I took over as leader of the Labour party.
“I said we need to do three things in the following order: we need to change the Labour party; we need to expose the government as not fit to govern; and we need to sell our positive case for change.
“If we do those things and if we’re focused and disciplined on them, we have a chance of picking our party up from the worst election results since 1935 and winning an election. I don’t think anybody disputes that we’ve made real progress on that.”
Morgan might not be won over but so many are, he said. “Two days ago, I was in Derby, and a woman came up to me in the Co-op and said I voted Conservative all my life. I’m now voting Labour.
“So you know, no one is going to get every single voter, but we’re making huge progress.”
Starmer was visiting Blackpool, one of the most deprived areas of England which, to the incredulity of many, has two Conservative MPs.
He insisted that he personally and the party more widely were cutting through to voters whose main concern was the cost of living.
“People are saying: ‘I can’t afford to get things I used to get, can’t have days out, aren’t planning the holidays we used to have.’
“People are saying to me: ‘I pick things up in the supermarket, I look at the price, I put them back down again.’
“People are saying: ‘Look, I turn the heating on for a short period in the morning, but I can’t afford to turn it on again, even if it’s cold.’
“In terms of me and the Labour party, the first thing they want to know is: do you get it? Do you even understand what I’m going through?
“When I’m able to say to them: ‘When I was growing up, we didn’t have a lot. My dad was a toolmaker, my mum was a nurse, we actually couldn’t make ends meet in our family, and we had our phone cut off,’ there’s a point of connection there, which is very, very important in politics.”
Starmer has been active in touring England before this Thursday’s local elections, a crucial day for the party even with a general election likely more than a year away.
The polling expert John Curtice on Monday told Radio 4’s Today programme that Labour needed to gain 500 council seats on Thursday to show it could win a general election. One party insider said the figure being talked about internally was 400.
The Labour leader would not be drawn on a figure but he said it would be a tough ask, given the local election results of four years ago.
“It was the dying days of Theresa May’s administration. The results for the Tories were so bad that she had to go and personally apologise to the candidates afterwards because it had gone so disastrously wrong.”
Now, Starmer said, the Tories were “briefing they are going to do even worse than [Theresa] May. You can’t have a story that Rishi Sunak is rebuilding the Tory party while saying there will be election results worse than 2019.
“Obviously I want to win as many seats as possible but it’s a tough set of elections for us because the baseline for the Tories is on the floor.”
It was not just about how many extra seats Labour wins, he said. It would be: “Are we picking up votes in the wards and the places that we need to pick up votes, when we’re looking at the constituencies we need to win in a general election?”
Starmer was visiting Blackpool with the shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson and parliamentary candidate Chris Webb.
It was mid-morning and the wrong time of day to be mobbed as he walked along the promenade but people were pleasant and curious.
A planned chat with local residents nearly went awry when Missie, a 15-month miniature schnauzer, would not stop barking at him.
“She gets anxious, that’s all,” her owner insisted and soon the dog, typically, was Starmer’s best friend.
The visit took in buying ice-creams at Notarianni’s ice-cream parlour, which has been at the same place and in the same family since 1928.
Would Starmer choose boring old vanilla or be more adventurous? Thankfully for his minders, there was only one choice. A sign instructs customers: “You can have any flavour you like as long as it’s vanilla.”
So it was three 99s at 10am on a grey Blackpool day and not even a headline about politicians on the take. “I’m not going to make the mistake of not paying,” said Starmer as he reached for his wallet.
