Starmer takes aim at ‘trickster’ Boris
SIR Keir Starmer attacked Boris Johnson as a “trickster” with no plan for running the country as he insisted Labour could win the next election.
In his first in-conference speech as Labour leader, Sir Keir said he is “totally serious” about defeating an inadequate Government that “can’t keep the fuel flowing” or supermarket shelves stocked.
But after a bruising conference in Brighton which has seen him clash with the Labour left, Sir Keir was heckled by activists over his refusal to support a £15 hourly minimum wage.
In a highly personal speech, the Labour leader described “family and work” as “the two rocks of my life – the two sources of what I believe to be right and good”, highlighting his background as the son of a toolmaker and an NHS nurse who later needed long-term care.
He also contrasted his past as the head of the Crown Prosecution Service with the Prime Minister’s background as a newspaper columnist.
“It’s easy to comfort yourself that your opponents are bad people,” he said. “But I don’t think Boris Johnson is a bad man. I think he is a trivial man. I think he’s a showman with nothing left to show. I think he’s a trickster who has performed his one trick.
“Once he had said the words: ‘Get Brexit Done,’ his plan ran out. There is no plan.”
He claimed Britain had been left “isolated and irrelevant” on the world stage under Mr Johnson.
But he also recognised Labour’s failure under Jeremy Corbyn to defeat the Tories, and praised the party activists who had saved it from “obliteration” in the landslide defeat in 2019.
Setting out the contrast between himself and the Prime Minister, Sir Keir said: “The one thing about Boris Johnson that offends everything I stand for is his assumption that the rules don’t apply to him.”
He referred to the actions of former No 10 aide Dominic Cummings and then health secretary Matt Hancock during the lockdown.
He added: “When I got pinged, I isolated. When Boris Johnson got pinged, he tried to ignore it. That’s not how I do business.”
Sir Keir also drew on his previous profession to position Labour as the party of law and order, promising to fast-track rape and sexual assault cases and tougher sentences for rapists, stalkers and domestic abusers.
The Labour leader said the coronavirus pandemic exposed the “failure of the Government’s duty of care over 11 years”, with the death toll “worse than it needed to be”.
“There are cracks in British society and Covid seeped into them,” he said.
Sir Keir also set out how Labour would tackle climate change, including a “national mission” to fit out homes to make them warm, well insulated and energy efficient over the next decade – creating thousands of jobs in the process.
There would be a new Clean Air Act and everything a Labour government does will have to meet a “net-zero” test to ensure that prosperity “does not come at the cost of the climate”.