Battle of the speeches: will Starmer or Sunak win over voters with new year pledges?

Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer set out their visions for the country just 24 hours apart this week and at the very same East London location.

The settings weren’t the only similarity, however, as both men “were each grappling to be seen as the most competent and inspiring manager of a rather bleak era”, said the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason.

In what The Times described as “an audacious pitch to Brexit voters”, Starmer declared the party’s proposals for devolution would allow people to “take back control” of their communities. The Labour leader said that his party must turn the message, which was used by Vote Leave during the Brexit campaign, “from a slogan to a solution” by ensuring power was spread far beyond Westminster.

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Sunak, meanwhile, in “a nod to the empty promises of Boris Johnson and the recklessness of Liz Truss” in the words of Sky News’s political editor Beth Rigby, made a pitch to “rebuild trust with the public, only promise what he could deliver” and try to “quietly get on with the job of working on ‘the people’s priorities’”.

What did the papers say?

With his “jacket off, sleeves rolled up, framed against a backdrop of heavy machinery”, if Keir Starmer “wanted to send a message that he’s itching for an election fight, he could scarcely have chosen better visuals for his new year address”, said Bloomberg’s senior economics reporter Phil Aldrick. And “on the worst day for train strikes, with the NHS deep in crisis and the economy heading into recession”, when Starmer said “‘our country is in a real mess’”, Aldrick added, “it was hard to disagree”.

While The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee praised Starmer for stealing the “killer Brexit slogan” in his speech’s main message, The Sun’s assessment was less glowing, claiming it made the Labour leader “look like he is merely shifting his position to whatever is most convenient”. Metro’s JJ Anisiøbi pointed out that while it was “a semi-rousing speech” Starmer’s insistence on devolving power from Westminster came “while speaking from London”.

Starmer’s “was unquestionably a more visionary speech than Sunak’s”, says Sky News’s Rigby but Starmer “carries none of the baggage of prime ministerial predecessors or the responsibility of being in office weighing Sunak down”.

Given the intensity of the challenges he faces, the prime minister “took the best strategic course open to him” by making “five pledges that he knows he is likely to hit: commitments on inflation, growth, debt, NHS waiting lists and small boats”, said Conservative Home’s editor Paul Goodman. Not everyone was so keen on the promises though, with Fraser Nelson in The Telegraph saying that while Sunak promised “no tricks”, “his pledges are, alas, almost all tricks”.

What next?

Sunak’s allies “have always said he’s a man defined more by action than words, but he doesn’t have much time to prove himself”, said The Spectator’s political editor Katy Balls. This is “a man who became prime minister in the blink of an eye, still attempting to introduce himself to the country”, agreed the BBC’s Mason.

For the moment, “Sunak is out of fashion”, said Goodman. But “his fundamental appeal is as a politician of the head, not the heart”, he added, so there’s still hope for the Tories that “the remote technocrat [can] morph into the Comeback Kid”.

Starmer, meanwhile, “is now able to stand before voters and the media as a plausible candidate for prime minister”, said The Times’s editorial. It’s telling that even a “longstanding Tory voter may become exhausted at this point and start looking at Starmer, asking if he would really be so much worse”, agreed Nelson.

Among voters themselves, an opinion poll tracker for the Daily Express, conducted over the past few days, found Labour a point up on the week before Christmas and 21 points ahead of the Conservatives, who have dropped 3 points. Of course, “there’s little chance many voters in the real world noticed either of the two speeches”, said Politico’s London Playbook.