Can Keir Starmer reunite the Labour party - and does he even want to?

Keir Starmer spent his first conference speech as Labour leader batting away unhappy hecklers.

During a “mammoth” 90-minute address, he “hit out at the government”, while also making new green policy announcements, such as a plan to retrofit millions of homes, reported Sky News.

Other key promises included reducing mental health waiting times to a “less than a month” and recruiting 8,500 more mental health professionals.

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It was “a highly personal speech”, which included a description of watching his mother fight for her life in hospital, said the London Evening Standard. He stressed his priorities would be based upon the “principles that have informed my life”, namely: “work, care, equality and security”.

“These are the tools of my trade,” said Starmer. “And with them I will go to work.”

But the Labour leader suffered several disruptions to his speech, including during the tribute to his mother. He hit back, asking delegates if they preferred “shouting slogans or changing lives”.

Jibes were also thrown at Prime Minister Boris Johnson: “Level up? You can’t even fill up,” he told the conference, alluding to the UK’s petrol crisis.

He called Johnson a “trivial man”, adding: “I think he’s a showman with nothing left to show, I think he’s a trickster who has performed his one trick.”

Internal rows have overshadowed the annual gathering in Brighton, with the shock resignation of shadow cabinet minister Andy McDonald yesterday triggering “a new and dangerous time” for the Labour leader, wrote The New Statesman’s Ailbhe Rea and Stephen Bush.

But Starmer is “happy to take the blows” dealt to him “if it means winning” the next general election, according to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.

More divided than ever?

McDonald quit his role as shadow secretary of state for employment rights and protections in a row over a £15 minimum wage and statutory sick pay. He “claims that his resignation was sparked by an exchange with the Labour leader’s office” during which he was ordered to argue against the proposals, The New Statesman’s Rea and Bush reported.

In his resignation letter, McDonald told Starmer that “after 18 months of your leadership, our movement is more divided than ever and the pledges that you made to the membership are not being honoured”.

The timing of the resignation is “severely damaging” for the Labour leadership, said Rea and Bush. “Splits and tensions” at the top of the party have been fuelled by a recent row over changes to Labour leadership election rules that already threatened to overshadow key policy announcements.

The resignation of a shadow cabinet member during a party conference is “extremely rare”, noted The Spectator’s Isabel Hardman. So far, she continued, it has been difficult to “glean a theme to the week from the official speeches and fringe debates”.

Winning over unity

Amid such warnings, Starmer is hitting back with his own fighting talk. In an interview with BBC political editor Kuenssberg yesterday, the Labour leader called on “every single Labour Party member and supporter” to share his focus on an election victory.

His bellicose rhetoric makes a change from that of the Labour of recent years, with the party “spinning round in smaller and smaller circles of rage, so consumed with its own angst that it forgot its purpose - to win elections and try to change the country”, Kuenssberg wrote after the televised chat.

Critics argue that Starmer’s shift in focus from party unity to the ballot box marks a significant departure from his leadership pitch last year.

During the leadership election, Starmer “sold himself as the unity candidate and said the party would not ‘oversteer’ from many of the best elements of the Corbyn era”, wrote his former adviser Simon Fletcher in The Guardian. There is now a “shortfall between what was promised and what has happened”, Fletcher argued, raising “very big questions for thousands on the Left and soft Left who voted for Starmer to be leader”.

Indeed, Starmer faces a “tricky balancing act”, said Politico. He “decisively won the leadership on a left-wing platform” but now must attempt to “move on from the Corbyn era while also convincing voters he’s a man of his word”.

The unhappiness of the Left of the party was clear to see during his speech, as persistent heckling disrupted much of it, including some shouts of “oh Jeremy Corbyn”.

But those close to the Labour leader claimed the hecklers had been “helpful”, reported Rea in The New Statesman. The interruptions may not “project the united Labour party that Keir Starmer promised”, but his supporters think they send another useful message to the country, she wrote: “Keir Starmer is not Jeremy Corbyn, and Labour has changed.”

Last gasp of the Corbynites?

Starmer’s “uncharacteristically gigantic gamble in confronting the Corbynite Left” has showed that “his party has remade itself”, argued Polly Toynbee in The Guardian.

The party has agreed to his proposed rule changes for party leadership elections - a victory that may be “irrelevant to voters”, Toynbee wrote, but had the reforms been blocked, the “Tory press” would have “gloried in it”. And while it’s “sad to see Andy McDonald resign”, that “feels like a last-gasp gesture from the losing Corbynites”, she added.

In “Starmer’s defence, he had to stabilise Labour after the madness of the Corbyn years”, wrote Fraser Nelson in The Telegraph, “and he has made more progress there than he’s given credit for”. The Labour leader has “put his party into the recovery position”.

But “opposing the government seems to be an exertion too far”, Fraser added. Starmer has “ended up as a Boris Johnson support act, sending Labour MPs to vote with the government whenever Tory rebels played up” - and, in doing so, leaving Conservative MPs to “do the job of opposition”.

Starmer’s “message for the Labour conference is that he has travelled the country listening to voters, has had a long think and is now ready to talk”.