Has Keir finally grasped that the Tories are there for the taking?
He’s now talking tough on trans children, immigration levels and eco-zealots. So...
IT STARTED two weeks ago. Sir Keir Starmer was working his way professionally, if robotically, through an interview for the parents’ website Mumsnet. Then he was asked his response to the independent review into gender reassignment services at the controversial Tavistock clinic for children. It was as if the Labour leader had been struck by a bolt of lightning.
‘I feel very strongly that children shouldn’t be making these very important decisions without the consent of their parents,’ he replied passionately. ‘I say that as a matter of principle. I say that as a parent.
‘We all know what it’s like with teenage children. I feel very strongly about this. This argument that children should make decisions without the consent of their parents is one I just don’t agree with at all.’
Last Sunday, lightning struck again. Starmer was being questioned on BBC Scotland over his view on immigration levels.
‘I think we’re recruiting too many people from overseas into, for example, the Health Service,’ he responded squarely. ‘We don’t want open borders. Freedom of movement has gone and it’s not coming back. So that means fair rules, firm rules, a points-based system. What I would like to see is the numbers go down in some areas.’
The response from the usual suspects was predictable. ‘Insulting,’ raged hard-Left campaign group Momentum. Starmer’s views on immigration meant he was ‘out of touch with the Labour Party and the Labour movement’.
The Independent, a Left-leaning news website, opined: ‘What was Keir Starmer thinking with his Mumsnet reply?’
It’s clear what Starmer was thinking. He was thinking that the Conservative Government is finally there for the taking and that the moment has come for him to stop pandering to the dwindling Corbynite rump in his party and start speaking for the British people.
‘Keir has decided it’s time to go for it,’ a Shadow Cabinet ally told me. ‘Up until now, his instinct has been to move cautiously. But our focus groups are all telling the same story. Rishi Sunak isn’t getting a significant bounce. People aren’t buying this idea the economic crisis is nothing to do with him. And now we need to drive home our advantage.’
AT THE start of last week, not every Shadow Minister was convinced Starmer’s interventions formed part of a grand new strategy. One told me they believed his comments on gender reassignment were simply him ‘cleaning up the mess’ after his notorious and much-ridiculed failure to explain what defines a woman. Another said they thought their boss’s observation about reducing migrant numbers was simple clumsiness.
But on Tuesday, Starmer was asked by LBC radio if he had a message for the climate activists blocking the M25. Oh yes. He most certainly did. ‘Get up. Go home,’ he declared robustly. ‘I’m opposed to what you’re doing. It’s not the way to deal with the climate crisis.’
As Starmer’s allies acknowledge, this new political dynamism is partly a product of opportunism. After a brief burst of euphoria following Rishi Sunak’s coronation as their leader, reality has smacked the Tories in the face. The polls aren’t shifting, the economic crisis is deepening and the chaos across public services is worsening. As one Shadow Minister told me bluntly: ‘If we can’t take this lot down now, we never will.’
At the same time, Starmer has begun to seriously up his game. His last two appearances at Prime Minister’s Questions have been among the most effective of his leadership.
His grip on his party has been strengthened by a series of parliamentary candidate selections that have seen moderates triumph and the Corbyn hold-outs routed. And Starmer’s bold decision to open the Labour Conference with a stirring rendition of God Save The King has helped neutralise Sunak’s attempt to paint him as some form of Leftist fellow traveller.
But despite this pivotal reinvention – indeed, because of this dramatic reinvention – the New Keir Starmer faces new dangers. For one, not all senior colleagues are happy marching in lockstep with him towards the political centre-ground.
A number of Shadow Ministers are concerned at the influence and profile of Ed Miliband, who set hares scurrying all over the Red Wall last Sunday by confirming a future Labour government would acknowledge Britain’s ‘historical responsibility’ to recompense countries such as the Maldives and Pakistan for climate change.
SIMILARLY, despite Starmer’s comments on reducing migration, many think that his Shadow Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, is too queasy about laying out a sufficiently hard line on controls. ‘The problem with Yvette is she’s always got one eye on the country and one eye on Labour activists,’ one Shadow Minister wryly observed. Another issue is that while Starmer is becoming emboldened on social policy, as yet there has been no major economic policy realignment. Those close to Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves insist she is keeping her powder dry until Thursday, when Chancellor Jeremy Hunt delivers the latest in a growing canon of emergency Budgets.
But despite the nation’s fiscal implosion, Labour remains wedded to its commitment to borrow an eye-watering £28billion to fund its Green New Deal.
The New Keir Starmer also faces potentially stiff resistance from one other significant opponent. The Old Keir Starmer.
Last week, one of his friends told me that a tough stance on immigration, hard-headed common sense on trans rights and a lock-em-up-throw-away-the-key approach to eco-zealots are all embedded in the political DNA of the Labour leader.
‘This is who he really is,’ the friend insisted. ‘He has this image as a North London liberal, but people forget he was Director of Public Prosecutions. He used to enjoy banging people up. At heart he’s a centrist.’ He isn’t.
Despite allies’ efforts to portray him as a hard-charging cross between US crime fighter Eliot Ness and Sweeney detective Jack Regan, Sir Keir Starmer is – and always will be – a liberal, Leftie, Camden barrister. But electorally that may not matter.
Tony Blair once proudly sported a CND badge but ended up carpetbombing Iraq. Boris Johnson wore a pink cowboy hat for a Gay Pride parade and became the darling of the Red Wall. The successful politicians are the ones who learn to adapt to the times and seize the moment. And New Keir Starmer has just such an opportunity.
The economic and political cycles are decoupling dangerously. Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt are rightly preparing to take the difficult decisions necessary to bring the public finances back into balance. But they are under no illusions about the enormity of that task, or the political consequences if Britain does indeed enter one of the longest recessions since records began.
‘No one is going to be complacent,’ a Shadow Minister told me, ‘but Keir is convinced that he now has the opportunity to finish off the Tories.’
If he’s prepared to continue to challenge his party – and himself – the New Keir Starmer could well be proved right.
I’VE been presented with the Nazi Iron Cross. It was handed to me personally in June, in a small red velvet bag in a bar in France. Its long journey into my hands involved many twists of fate, random coincidences and meetings with strangers who later became friends. And God knows what my late father would have made of it – he was a Commando at D-Day. Before it was handed over to me, I’d seen the infamous black medal embossed with the swastika only in films and documentaries. I’d certainly never held one. How it came into my hands has taught me a lot about history and about remembrance, too.
The Iron Cross – or ‘Eisernes Kreuz’ – was a bravery award first given for distinguished service in Prussia during the 19th Century. Thousands were presented during the Nazi era. My Eisernes Kreuz is date-stamped 1939, when Hitler issued his version of the historic gallantry decoration upon the invasion of Poland.
Here’s what I know about ‘my’ Cross. It was awarded to Theodor Baas, a 19-year-old gunner in a Panzer tank division. He was one of the German troops occupying France and fighting the Allies in the ferocious three-month Battle of Normandy that followed the landings in June 1944.
Tens of thousands of soldiers lost their lives, and whole French cities were razed to the ground by the firepower of both sides.
Bass came to regret bitterly his role in Hitler’s killing and destruction. Friends had died alongside him; his enemies all around perished in planes, in armoured vehicles and face-to-face, yards away, too.
But still he fought till the final weeks of the war, when German resistance to the Allied advance took the Western wartime leaders by surprise.
He found himself in dense forest in Belgium’s Ardennes region, at the Battle of the Bulge – the last major enemy offensive on the war’s western front – before finally being taken prisoner by the Americans.
As the years wore on, this gunner who had been awarded by the Nazi regime for gallantry found that his nightmares never ceased. At long distance, the killing had seemed anonymous. He operated an antiaircraft gun. But at night he saw close up in his mind the faces of his friends and his enemies in the moments before their deaths.
I know this because in 2004, 79-year-old Bass wrote a letter to his former enemies describing the sickening scenes of exploding aircraft and tanks, and of close combat.
‘At that time, we thought we had to defend our native country against the Allied forces,’ he wrote. ‘Years later we recognised we were cheated by our political leaders.’
He wanted his words to be widely seen, as he couldn’t travel to France himself owing to his declining health. He wrote: ‘I came to this beautiful country as an enemy. I would have liked to have come back as a friend.’ But he never did.
He’s long dead now. Years have passed since he wrote that letter. Now the tale of his Iron Cross has passed to me. The historic medal was handed over by another German ex-serviceman, his son Juergen, a former flight lieutenant with the Luftwaffe.
It happened this summer, as I was standing in a bar in Normandy travelling with the few D-Day veterans left alive, along with their friends, families and current servicemen and women.
‘What’s in here?’ I asked, as Juergen pushed the small purselike bag towards me. I’ve come to know him very well over the years, as we’ve both been welcomed by the same band of veterans.
He was born long after the war, and served alongside British forces in Nato. He’s now retired and travels often to the commemorations on the French coast.
We’ve met many times, and he once gave a speech to British veterans in which he told them what the defeat of the Nazi fascists meant: ‘You defeated my father – but you liberated me.’
As I stood there in June in a bar filled with French, British, Belgian and Dutch friends, a young Royal Marine played the bagpipes in the street. The commemorations were behind us and we’d watched with pride as the few veterans left alive saluted the comrades who travelled to France in 1944 and never came home. We were all soon to say goodbye and head back to Portsmouth.
Juergen had chosen this moment to make his grand gesture. I was pretty sure that his eyes were filling up as he said: ‘It’s for you. Take a look.’
Inside was an Iron Cross with a swastika at its centre. The Americans had confiscated the original – but this was the authentic replace
He bitterly regretted his role in Hitler’s killing and destruction
ment, a memento for Juergen of his father’s gallantry.
What makes a man give away such a thing? Well, he obviously wanted me to have the Iron Cross as I’m the son of a British veteran.
Captain Guy O’Connell was just 22 when, in June 1944, he landed in Normandy on Gold Beach with the Royal Marines. Days earlier, he’d joined history’s largest armada forming up in secret in the seas off Southampton. Around him were tens of thousands of young men – the Allies whose job was to land in France, then fight through the destruction and slaughter in Europe until the war’s end.
Capt O’Connell would command a small troop of 30 men, specialists in firing mortars and machine guns, across Nazi-occupied Europe.
He died in the 1970s when I was 11, having never spoken to me about the war. Perhaps he thought it was no business for a child. I remember my mum buying me a pair of shoes called Clarks Commandos, which came with a badge to wear on your jumper and a compass in the heel. It was a clever way of getting a small boy to wear smart shoes.
I wore that commando badge with glee, yet my dad never said a word about being the real deal, having been awarded the Marines’ famous green beret after training at Achnacarry in the Highlands of Scotland – or Castle Commando, as it later become known.
In 1940, Winston Churchill had ordered the creation of a fighting unit of ‘specially trained troops of the hunter class’. They were all volunteers from other regiments, as I found out years later when researching my father’s life.
Along with learning the story of his wartime service, I met his surviving comrades and began to travel to commemorative events with them and their families and friends. I’ve walked the cemeteries with them, and heard them say out loud: ‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them.’
But I’ve also heard the stories behind the names on the headstones. ‘Our landing craft was hit. I saw the major dive from the sinking bow. He was found washed up on the shore. This is his final resting place.’
Like many proud sons and daughters – including thousands of readers of The Mail on Sunday – among my treasured possessions, I’ve got my father’s medals.
I don’t think he ever wore them. He put them in the same Player’s Navy Cut cigarette tin that his father – my grandfather – had used to store his medals from the First World War.
The piece of paper that accompanied the box they came in in the mail is still so tightly creased that it looks as if it’s been read only once.
So along with these family heirlooms, I’ve now got another Second
Our landing craft was hit. I saw the major dive from the sinking bow
World War medal – one from the enemy side.
I’m sure it should next go into better hands than mine. I won’t keep it long. Starting today, I am going to try to use it to raise charitable funds for the Royal Marines. It seems to tell a Remembrance Sunday story.
A new King will lead the commemoration to the dead of all wars. There is a new threat in Europe, and Vladimir Putin has become the latest strongman to bomb children in the name of nationalism.
So what can one enemy medal tell us as we honour those who fought for freedom on our behalf?
Somehow, the small piece of metal proves how little people like me, who have never fought in uniform or been a civilian trapped in a deadly warzone, will ever understand about conflict. The people who fight wars keep telling the rest of us to stop them.
Perhaps there is one word which explains the long journey of this Iron Cross, a word just as powerful as war but all too often taken for granted. If I had to work out the motive for a son handing over an ancient medal, I’d say that word is… peace.
• The fee for this article has been donated to the Royal Marines Charity (rma-trmc.org). You can text Royal to 70470 to donate £5 to this cause. Join Paddy O’Connell today live at the Cenotaph on BBC Radio 4 at 10.30am.