Starmer: a “question of vision”
“Keir Starmer resembles an armadillo,” said John Rentoul in The Independent. “That would be my answer to the popular focusgroup question: if this or that politician were an animal, what would they be?” He’s a “wellarmoured, compact, defensive unit” who protects himself well against “natural predators” such as Boris Johnson: the PM’s wild recent claim that he was an “IRA sympathiser” simply “bounced off”. And his “political style is to give little away”. For instance, Starmer almost certainly has a low opinion of Jeremy Corbyn, but any attempt to elicit criticism is “met with a blank face, an ambiguous smile and a brisk moving on of the conversation”. In his cautious way, he has “done a remarkable job” of pulling Labour back from its worst election defeat since 1935, while taking the Government to task over its record on Covid-19. After just five months, he has brought Labour level with the Tories at the polls, “mainly by appearing earnest and competent”.
Earnestness and competence will only get you so far, said Matt Chorley in The Times. To win back the many voters who deserted Labour last
December, he’ll also need to get them singing his tune. And yet “Starmer remains strangely tuneless”. The “more in sorrow than in anger” routine which he uses on Johnson makes too little impact. He’s like a weatherman. “You know he’s talking but you can’t retain any of it.” Johnson may lose – but “Starmer never quite manages to win”.
Perhaps, but Starmer has to perform a difficult balancing act, said Stephen Bush in the New Statesman. He needs to keep the party’s powerful radical left in line, while trying to win back the “new Toryvoting, Brexit-supporting working class”, largely in the Red Wall seats of the Midlands and the North – “who are socially and culturally conservative but economically on the left”. The real issue is the “question of vision”, said Alan Finlayson in The Guardian. We know Starmer is in charge, but what does he stand for? Any would-be prime minister must offer a “sense of direction and purpose”, a “compelling explanation” of how we got to this moment, and how we can create a better future. “Starmer needs a Starmerism, and he needs it now.”