Keir Starmer: can he sway the voters?
Keir Starmer’s “very long speech” at the Labour conference last week – an hour and a half, to be precise – won him 17 standing ovations, said Isabel Hardman in The Spectator. But it will largely be remembered as the speech during which he was “repeatedly heckled by the hard-left”. The shouting from the conference floor was insistent and often inappropriate, especially when Starmer was recalling his late mother’s illness. But, in fact, “it worked hugely in his favour”. He was ready with ripostes: Labour, he declared, had a choice between “shouting slogans or changing lives”. Starmer roused the majority to drown out the Corbynite remnants. He showed that he “wants to turn his party away from the past 11 years of opposition, and he doesn’t mind who heckles him as he goes”.
He is “no natural barnstormer”, said Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, but Starmer made a pleasing contrast to Boris Johnson, showing that he’s ready when the public tires of that “clown-showman”. The themes of his speech were “strong”: crime and security, from his experience as a prosecutor; work, forged by his toolmaker father; the value of care, impressed on him by his nurse mother. No one can call him policy-free now, either: he laid out plans for a £28bn Green New Deal. The Tories must start taking Sir Keir seriously, said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. He may be “worthy and dullish”, but he is also “reliable and organised” – which voters might soon yearn for.
I doubt it, said Sherelle Jacobs in The Daily Telegraph. Starmer “botched his chance” with this “lacklustre speech”. It was a great opportunity: the country “craves an opposition capable of responding to the strange times we are living through”. But he had practically nothing to say about the big issues of the day: Covid, Brexit, shortages. “Starmer appears to be incapable of speaking to the nation.” We shouldn’t be too “churlish”, said Robert Shrimsley in the FT. Starmer has shown that Labour is “serious about winning power”. That’s good, but the fact that it needed saying is damning in itself: nobody ever questions that the Tories want to win. The Labour leader should savour last week’s “triumph”, but “all he has done is to put his party back in the race”.