Keir cannot afford another fiasco like welfare,” one Starmer loyalist told me, recalling the government’s humiliating climbdown on proposed cuts to disability benefits after a revolt by Labour MPs. The prime minister knows the episode showed that his way of governing is unsustainable. He is consulting people widely this summer about how to turn things round.
There’s a fierce internal debate taking place. In Keir Starmer’s right ear, Morgan McSweeney, his influential chief of staff, tells him to focus on wooing back voters in the red wall from Nigel Farage. In his left ear, soft-left cabinet ministers urge a more progressive approach to woo centre-left voters who have deserted Labour for the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. They argue that these lost voters outnumber defectors to Reform by a margin of three to one.
The soft left’s allies in Downing Street want Starmer to emulate Bill Clinton, who fought back against a right-wing populist – Newt Gingrich, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives – after a rocky start to his first term in 1993. One minister admitted: “There is a battle over the direction of the government. There is only one person who can resolve it. Keir has got to decide for himself – based on his values, who he is, who he wants to be.”
The left-ear whisperers want the PM to trust the instincts that are serving him well on foreign affairs and apply them to the domestic agenda, too. Starmer appeared to be tacking leftwards when he told Tom Baldwin for the paperback version of his biography, published on Thursday: “We have to be the progressives fighting against the populists of Reform – yes, Labour has to be a progressive party.” He has hinted that he wants to tackle child poverty by scrapping the two-child benefit limit.
The PM has nodded to Labour critics who argue – persuasively – that his government has sometimes acted left but talked right, and that it’s no wonder, therefore, that it gets little credit from progressive voters. He said that issues such as clean energy, nationalising the railways and increasing the national minimum wage should be shouted louder from the rooftops. “We should show we’re proud of all that,” he told Baldwin. Starmer views this as part of “telling a better story”. But you can only tell one if you know the direction in which you are heading.
The battle isn’t over yet; I’m told McSweeney is not convinced about a shift to the left. His critics say the shortcomings of attacking Reform head-on were illustrated when the science secretary Peter Kyle claimed Farage was on the paedophile Jimmy Savile’s side in the heated debate over internet regulation. The attack line was reportedly approved by No 10, but it backfired. It was the sort of smear we might expect from Reform. The lesson for Starmer: Labour can’t “out-Farage Farage”, and the public will vote for the real thing if Labour tries to look like Reform-lite.
Allies of McSweeney believe the red wall will decide the next general election, so Labour’s primary pitch must be to the white working class. His internal opponents insist that trying to re-run the 2024 election triumph, McSweeney’s greatest hit, will not work next time. They dispute the idea that Labour “won” the north and the Midlands last year, saying that it reaped the benefit of a split on the right between the Conservatives and Reform, and that Labour regained seats seized by the Tories in 2019 mainly because Tory voters switched to Reform.
At the next election, Farage will likely hoover up the right-wing vote. Crucially, the left vote will be split this time – inflicting deep damage to Labour unless Starmer can appeal to left-of-centre voters. He won’t do that by tacking right, cutting benefits for the disabled and pensioners or aping Farage. For Starmer to win a presidential contest against the Reform leader, being the anti-Farage candidate will not be enough: he will have to offer progressive voters more than he has offered them so far.
Another reason why Starmer should listen to the buzz in his left ear is that the new socialist party launched by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana will present another alternative to disenchanted Labour voters. It already has 600,000 registered supporters.
Starmer won’t lurch to the Corbyn hard left – and rightly so. But the sensible decision he should make this summer is that it’s time for Labour to live up to its name and its values, and stop pretending to be something it is not.
