Has Keir Starmer exorcised Labour's demons?

Keir Starmer is insisting his leadership of the Labour Party has been not "just a paint job" but a "total overhaul", as he seeks to banish the demons from four successive election defeats. 

Speaking in Milton Keynes on the fourth anniversary of Labour's historic general election loss in 2019, he urged voters not to hand the Conservatives a "fifth term" in power. "Only a change of government can bring change," he said.

Starmer said that his "driving project" as Labour leader has been to restore the party to "the service of working people" in the four years since Labour's worst defeat since 1935. 

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"Working people up and down our country looked at my party, looked at how we'd lost our way, not just under Jeremy Corbyn, but for a while, and they said 'no'. Not this time. You don't listen to us any more," he told supporters at Silverstone race track. 

Starmer added that everything he had done as Labour leader was intended to "reconnect" to the party's purpose of representing working people and to assure them that it had "changed fundamentally".

What the papers said

Starmer's speech appeared to be "designed to appeal to Tory 2019 voters who tell pollsters that they do not intend to support the Conservatives at the next election but are so far unconvinced by Labour", said The Times. In doing so, Starmer criticised not just his controversial predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, "but also by implication Ed Miliband", who led the party to defeat in 2015 and is now Starmer's  energy secretary.

When questioned about this later, Starmer only "doubled down", said Paul Waugh on the i news site. Starmer insisted that while Miliband was "a very good" shadow cabinet minister, under his leadership the party "drifted too far from the core function of serving working people". It was "a mistake", Starmer said, to think Corbyn was the "sole cause" of Labour's 2019 election failure.

If Starmer has realised that the leadership of the Labour Party in the post-Tony Blair years has been "a 13-year detour in the wilderness, that can only be a good thing for the party and for the country", said John Rentoul in The Independent, praising him for returning to the "true path of Blairism". 

But has Labour changed fundamentally? In some ways, said Sean O'Grady in the same paper. The fact that Corbyn has lost the Labour whip and won't be permitted to fight the next election as an official Labour candidate "speaks volumes". But many among the party's grassroots "still pine for socialism and would happily have Corbyn back". Starmer's claim that his party has had a "total overhaul" is therefore "a little overstated".

Starmer was happy to use his speech to "admit his party's guilt in neglecting its historic mission to strive on behalf of working people". But he risked reminding us of the other reasons for "voter disillusionment" with Labour – and those had nothing to do with Labour's former leaders, said Tom Harris in The Telegraph.

Chief among them is "Labour's appalling record on Brexit and its cynical attempts, led by Starmer, to reverse the result of the 2016 EU referendum". Starmer "needs to recognise that his party's refusal to respect Leave's victory was part of that betrayal of Labour's historic mission to champion working people", said Harris. And work needs to be done "to reassure voters that he's learned his lesson". 

What next?

Starmer's party continues on an election footing, with some speculating that he may have "forced out" Labour's Mark Drakeford as first minister of Wales to "boost the party's chances at the next election", said the Daily Mail's chief political correspondent David Churchill. 

With the first minister's approval rating plummeting in Wales, Welsh Labour sources have suggested that Starmer "wanted Drakeford gone because it could threaten the party's chances at the polls", as Starmer eyes the possibility of an early 2024 election, said Churchill.

For Starmer, Conservative infighting over its Rwanda policy is a "gift that keeps on giving", said Martin Kettle in The Guardian. "All this ensures exactly what Labour most wants – another well-advertised display of Tory backbench delirium and party fracture for the nation to shake its head at," Kettle continued. 

"A long succession of similar events has fed Labour's more than two-year lead in the opinion polls. This week may have topped up that lead again."