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      Johnson Is All Apologies Before Parliament After ‘Partygate’ Fine

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      Though opposition politicians called him out, only one member of his own Conservative party called on him to resign.Boris Johnson, the prime minister of Britain, apologized to members of Parliament after he was fined by police for attending a lockdown party in Downing Street during the height of the pandemic.Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockLONDON — Prime Minister Boris Johnson faced Parliament on Tuesday as an awkward pioneer in British politics: a confirmed lawbreaker who misled fellow lawmakers but remains ensconced in the nation’s highest elected office.Apologizing profusely for his recent police fine for breaching coronavirus restrictions, Mr. Johnson tried to move on from a scandal over illicit Downing Street parties that has threatened his hold on power. The war in Ukraine and a lack of obvious successors to him have conspired to keep him in his job, at least for now.But Mr. Johnson’s political resilience did not mask the weighty legal and constitutional issues at stake. Opposition lawmakers hammered the prime minister for flouting the rules he imposed on others and accused him of misleading Parliament when he claimed that none of the social gatherings held in his office had been improper.“He knows he’s dishonest and incapable of changing, so he drags everybody else down with him,” said Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party. He urged backbench members of Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party not to follow “in the slipstream of an out-of-touch, out-of-control prime minister.”Only a single Conservative lawmaker, Mark Harper, called on Mr. Johnson to resign. Several echoed the arguments of his cabinet ministers that the scandal was a distraction at a time when Europe is facing its gravest security crisis since World War II. Forcing out their leader now, they said, would be a mistake.Still, the angry, emotional tenor of the debate revealed how deeply the scandal has blackened Mr. Johnson’s reputation. No prime minister in living memory has been formally designated as a lawbreaker, and he faces the prospect of additional fines for attending other illicit parties. Tory lawmakers began drifting out of the chamber as the debate wore on, suggesting limits to the party’s backing for him.The angry, emotional tenor of the debate in Parliament revealed how deeply the scandal has blackened Mr. Johnson’s reputation.Tolga Akmen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Johnson stuck to his penitent tone, apologizing more than a dozen times, though he never explicitly admitted to breaking the law, when asked directly. He was especially contrite about his previous statements to Parliament, which pose a particular danger to him since they have been exposed as misleading, either intentionally or unwittingly.“It did not occur to me, then or subsequently, that a gathering in the Cabinet room just before a vital meeting on Covid strategy could amount to a breach of the rules,” Mr. Johnson said. “That was my mistake and I apologize for it unreservedly.”Ministers caught lying to Parliament are expected to resign under rules written in what is known as the ministerial code. As recently as 2018, a Conservative lawmaker, Amber Rudd, quit as home secretary after admitting that she had “inadvertently misled” lawmakers over government targets for removing illegal immigrants.“The ministerial code is quite clear: deliberately misleading Parliament is a resigning offense since it prevents Parliament doing its job of scrutiny,” said Vernon Bogdanor, an expert on constitutional issues and professor of government at King’s College London. “The trouble is that there is no means of enforcing this principle against a prime minister if his party continues to support him.”Indeed, the ultimate arbiter of the ministerial code is the prime minister himself. Mr. Johnson has disregarded this system of checks and balances before, in 2020, when they involved a member of his government.That was when Mr. Johnson’s independent ethics adviser, Alex Allan, concluded that the home secretary, Priti Patel, had breached the ministerial code in her treatment of members of her staff, even if she was not aware she was bullying them. Despite that finding, Mr. Johnson decided that Ms. Patel had not breached the code and should not resign, and it was ultimately Mr. Allan who quit.Now Mr. Johnson is in the odd position of being a prime minister who is accused of breaking the code, making him effectively the judge and jury in his own case. He has made it clear that he has no intention of stepping down, declaring that the best way to come back from this scandal is to deliver on behalf of the British people.“It’s something the people who drew up the ministerial code didn’t really anticipate happening,” said Hannah White, deputy director of the Institute for Government, a London-based think tank. Under what she called the “good chap” theory of government, the prime minister would typically have resigned before getting to this point.Understand Boris Johnson’s Recent TroublesCard 1 of 5Turmoil at Downing Street. More

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      Do Germany’s Election Results Signal a Left Turn for Europe?

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      It is too early to tell, but the results certainly illustrate a fragmentation in politics and the growing influence of personalities.Sunday’s election in Germany ended in victory for the country’s Social Democratic Party and its candidate, Olaf Scholz. It was a remarkable comeback for a center-left party, which like many of its counterparts across Europe has been bleeding support at the ballot box for the past decade or more.So the question immediately arises whether Mr. Scholz’s victory in Germany may be a harbinger of revival more broadly for the center-left parties that were once mainstays of the continent’s politics.Inside Germany, Mr. Scholz is preparing for negotiations to form a left-leaning coalition government with the Greens and the libertarian Free Democrats. After his centrist campaign, just how left-leaning remains an open question. And nothing is guaranteed: His conservative rival, who lost by just 1.6 percentage points, has not conceded and also wants to try to form a coalition.Though the results have thrown Mr. Scholz’s conservative opponents into disarray, the landscape for the center left also remains challenging. Elsewhere in Europe, many center-left parties have watched their share of votes erode as their traditional base among unionized, industrial workers disappears and as political blocs splinter into an array of smaller parties.But after a surge among right-wing populists in recent years, there are some signs that the political pendulum may be poised to swing back. Here is a look at the factors that will influence whether a center-left revival is possible.Big-tent parties on both sides have shrunk.The German elections have cast in sharp relief the continuation of a trend that was already visible across the continent: fragmentation and volatility in political support.Only three decades ago, Germany’s two leading parties garnered over 80 percent of the vote in a national election. On Sunday, the Social Democrats received just 25.7 percent, while the Christian Democrats, together with their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, received 24.1 percent — calling into question their legitimacy as “Volkspartei” or big-tent parties that represent all elements of society.Inside a polling station, a gym at a secondary school in Berlin Neukölln, on Sunday.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesThe votes being lost by the once-dominant parties are going to parties with more narrowly defined positions — whether the Greens, animated by environmental issues, or the libertarian Free Democratic Party. If the German vote were broken down by traditional notions of “right” and “left,” it would be nearly evenly divided, with some 45 percent on each side.On the eve of the coronavirus pandemic, a survey of 14 European Union countries in 2019 by the Pew Research Center found that few voters expressed positive views of political parties. Only six out of nearly 60 were seen favorably by more than 50 percent of the populations in their countries. Populist parties across Europe also received largely poor reviews.The left has a lot of recovering to do.It remains to be seen whether the Social Democrats in Germany will be able to lead a governing coalition. But if they do, they will join a relatively small club.Of the 27 member states in the European Union, only Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Malta have distinctly center-left governments.The old voting coalitions that empowered the center-left across the continent after 1945 included industrial workers, public sector employees and urban professionals. But those groups, driven primarily by class and economic needs, have fragmented.Two decades ago, Tony Blair’s Labour Party cruised to re-election in Britain, promoting center-left policies similar to those of President Bill Clinton. Now, Labour has been out of power for more than a decade, and in recent elections it has suffered stinging losses in working-class parts of England where its support once ran deep.In France, the center-left Socialist Party has never recovered from the unpopular presidency of François Hollande and its disastrous performance in the subsequent elections. Since then, France has moved increasingly to the right, with support for the Socialists and other left-leaning parties shrinking.With an eye toward presidential elections next April, President Emmanuel Macron, who ran as a centrist in 2017, has been courting voters on the right. Polls show that he and Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally, are the two favorites to make it out of the first round and meet in a runoff.President Emmanuel Macron of France speaking at a police academy in Roubaix this month.Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnne Hidalgo, the Paris mayor and Socialist presidential hopeful, has been losing support since declaring her candidacy early this month. According to a poll released last Thursday, only 4 percent of potential voters said they would support her in the first round next April.And ‘left’ is not what it used to be.In the aftermath of World War II, as money flooded into Europe through the Marshall Plan and industry boomed, those who opposed Communism but were worried that capitalism could stoke instability and inequality came together under a broad umbrella of center-left parties.They favored strong trade unions and welfare states with generous education and health care systems.In Germany, as in other countries, the lines between the center left and the center right began to fade some time ago.But if there is one animating issue for many voters on the left and the right, it is the role that the European Union should play in the governance of nations.Many far-right parties have won support by casting Brussels as a regulatory overlord stripping sovereignty from the union’s member states. Ms. Merkel’s conservatives, by contrast, are very pro-European Union — yet have been wary of deepening some fiscal ties inside the bloc. Many Social Democrats argue, however, that the European Union must be strengthened through deeper integration.Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands, with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, the top E.U. official Ursula von der Leyen and Mr. Macron during economic rescue discussions in Brussels in 2020.Pool photo by Francisco SecoEurope’s bonds were tested in the pandemic, and that process may have ultimately helped the Social Democrats as Germany set aside its traditional abhorrence of shared E.U. debt to unleash emergency spending.It was a plan that Mr. Scholz, who is Germany’s finance minister, drew up with his French counterpart. Ms. Merkel, who approved the deal, has since repeatedly pointed out was a one-off.Mr. Scholz’s central role in crafting the deal put him squarely on the side of Germans in favor of ever-tighter connections with their European neighbors.Personality counts for more than ever.Another common denominator in the fragmented European political landscape is that personalities seem to be far more important to voters than traditional parties and the issues they represent.There have always been outsized personalities on the European political stage. But whether it was Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl or Willy Brandt, they were more often than not guided by a set of ideological principles.The failure of the leading political parties to address the problems confronting voters has led to a new generation of leaders who position themselves as iconoclasts. Mr. Macron in France and Boris Johnson in Britain could hardly be more different. But both are opportunistic, flout convention and have crafted larger-than-life personas to command public attention. So far, voters have rewarded them.Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York last week.Pool photo by Eduardo MunozAngela Merkel was their polar opposite, a study in staid reticence who transcended ideological differences by exuding stability. Her party’s candidate, Armin Laschet, couldn’t convince voters that he was her natural heir, which opened the door to Mr. Scholz, who managed to cast himself as the most Merkel-like candidate — despite being in another party.Norimitsu Onishi More

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      Labour Leader, Keir Starmer, Struggles to Emerge From Boris Johnson’s Shadow

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      Competent but low on charisma, Keir Starmer has yet to give British voters a clear reason to support the main opposition party, critics say.LONDON — If Prime Minister Boris Johnson went to one extreme with his pithy 2019 election slogan — “get Brexit done” — the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Keir Starmer, has gone to the other.Ahead of Labour’s annual conference, which began this weekend, Mr. Starmer penned a policy statement designed to showcase his beliefs that ran to more than 11,000 words. Despite that novella-like length, it is unlikely to compete with the best-sellers.Serious, competent but lacking charisma, Mr. Starmer is a mirror image of Mr. Johnson, a polarizing politician renowned for phrasemaking and showmanship rather than steadiness or a firm grip on policy.Yet when Mr. Starmer speaks to Labour members in the English seaside city of Brighton this week, he badly needs some pizazz — both to raise his profile and to explain the agenda of a party that suffered a crushing election defeat in 2019 under its previous, left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn.“If you put Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson together they would be the ideal politician,” said Steven Fielding, a professor of political history at Nottingham University. But after a lackluster year, Professor Fielding said, Mr. Starmer “has got to communicate his sense of purpose and what the point of the Labour Party is under his leadership in post-Covid Britain.”“It’s an existential question he has to ask himself, to answer and then communicate,” Professor Fielding said.No one doubts the intelligence, seriousness or competence of Mr. Starmer, a former chief prosecutor who worked his way from a modest start in life to the highest echelons of the legal establishment.Critics say Mr. Starmer has failed to make his presence felt in a way that enhances Labour’s public standing.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut some think he is not savvy enough politically, while others accuse him of picking internal fights to underscore his opposition to the Corbynite left. Those include a dispute over changes to the voting system for future party leadership contests that would probably have stopped a left-winger from getting the top job again. That plan caused sufficient anger within the party that Mr. Starmer was forced to put forward a watered-down version instead.Yet the more telling complaint is that he has simply failed to make his presence felt in a way that showcases the party’s positions or enhances its standing with the public. Nor, critics say, has he exploited Mr. Johnson’s numerous setbacks.Elected last year following Labour’s catastrophic 2019 defeat, Mr. Starmer has spent much of his leadership detoxifying a party whose image was marred by persistent infighting over allegations of anti-Semitism. That culminated in the suspension of Mr. Corbyn, who remains excluded from Labour’s parliamentary group.That focus on interparty turmoil, along with the 80-seat majority that Mr. Johnson’s conservatives enjoy, has relegated Labour to the role of an onlooker in Parliament — so much so that Mr. Johnson brazenly broke a vow and raised taxes this month without fear that Mr. Starmer and his colleagues could do much to take advantage of it.Perhaps mindful of the need to confront the Conservatives more aggressively, Mr. Starmer stepped up his criticism this weekend, telling the BBC that there had been a “complete lack of planning” by the government over the shortage of truck drivers that has Britons anxious about the delivery of fuel and goods.In terms of election strategy, Labour faces a huge challenge. In 2019, it lost a clutch of parliamentary seats in its former strongholds — the middle and north of the country — as working-class voters warmed to Mr. Johnson, with his pro-Brexit agenda and willingness to wade into culture wars.That left Mr. Starmer with the unenviable task of winning back those traditional Labour voters behind the so-called “red wall” without alienating anti-Brexit supporters in big cities like London, where the party’s support is increasingly concentrated.His bad luck is that the pandemic has dominated the media agenda, keeping the government at center stage and giving it a megaphone to trumpet its leadership role, whether merited or not.During the early months of the Covid crisis, the prime minister floundered, initially resisting lockdowns then having to reverse course, and Mr. Starmer outperformed Mr. Johnson in their head-to-heads in Parliament. The government’s effective vaccine rollout revived the Conservatives’ fortunes, but that effect has now faded and Britain faces an uncertain winter, with the effects of the pandemic difficult to predict. Still, Mr. Johnson is polling reasonably well for an accident-prone leader in the middle of his term.Critics on the left say that Mr. Starmer’s camp has opted for platitudes and shied away from distinctive left-of-center policies to avoid offending any electoral group.“They thought that Starmer is Biden and Johnson is Trump, and that Johnson would self-destruct,” said James Schneider, a former spokesman for Mr. Corbyn. “The difference is that Biden is a hugely more appealing figure to the American public — he has an everyman appeal.”A Jeremy Corbyn mask at the Labour conference in Brighton on Saturday.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen Labour lost an election for a vacant parliamentary seat in northern England in May, Mr. Starmer suffered another self-inflicted setback with a botched reshuffle of his top team. He appeared to blame his deputy, Angela Rayner, for the defeat, stripping her of a key position, but he was forced to retreat in the face of a backlash and eventually gave her more responsibilities.A full-blown leadership crisis was averted when Labour unexpectedly went on to win an election in another northern constituency, Batley and Spen, in July.But there may be challenges to Mr. Starmer’s authority as he prepares to take on Mr. Johnson in a general election that must take place by 2024 but is expected a year earlier. One Labour member on the ascent is Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, who has raised his profile during the pandemic.Others in the party are still committed to Mr. Corbyn’s hard-left agenda and remain angry about Mr. Starmer’s push to change the voting system. It also wants Mr. Corbyn reinstated to the parliamentary group.The worry for more moderate Labour supporters is that they may be seeing a repeat of the leadership of Ed Miliband, who, like Mr. Starmer, came from the “soft left” of the Labour Party, but who lost the 2015 general election.Tom Baldwin, a former spokesman for Mr. Miliband, said that he believed Mr. Starmer could win and that he could well be an effective prime minister. But he was also critical of his lack of a convincing message and his focus on internal battles, which he said “are not going to help us reconnect ourselves to voters.”“I would prefer if the Labour Party were having a conversation with the country about the country,” Mr. Baldwin said.Mr. Starmer’s supporters say voters will become disenchanted with Mr. Johnson in light of his broken promise not to raise taxes, and that the government will fail to deliver on his pledges to bring prosperity to neglected parts of the country.Anti-Brexit demonstrators in Brighton on Saturday. Mr. Starmer needs to avoid alienating such voters in big cities while trying to win back traditional Labour support elsewhere.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOnce “normal” politics resumes after the pandemic, voters will ultimately warm to Mr. Starmer, they argue. Though he prefers to talk about policy rather than personality, Mr. Starmer spoke movingly about his upbringing in a recent interview with Piers Morgan.Still, his personality is very different from that of Mr. Johnson, and most analysts believe his best tactic is to lean into his strengths, hoping that voters are drawn to a man who exudes stability after years of political turmoil.It is also critical, political analysts say, that Mr. Starmer give voters a clear reason to support the Labour Party.“He’s got to find a message, he’s got to be able to communicate that message and to be able to sell it, and he’s not done any of this so far,” Professor Fielding said. “Competence isn’t enough.” More

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      Labour's Kim Leadbeater Wins U.K. By-Election in Batley and Spen

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      The election this week of the sister of Jo Cox, a lawmaker who was killed in 2016, was seen as a victory for Labour’s leader in a region where Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives had made big inroads.LONDON — Britain’s opposition Labour Party on Friday scored an unexpected if narrow victory in a battle for an open Parliament seat that was widely seen as a critical test for the party’s leader, Keir Starmer, who has been under pressure for failing to revive the party’s fortunes.Many had expected that the Conservatives would take the seat, which Labour has held since 1997, because of the spoiler campaign of George Galloway. The victory will be a big relief for Mr. Starmer, who faced criticism in May when his party lost a by-election in Hartlepool, another former stronghold in the north of England.That result added weight to the idea that support for Labour had collapsed in the “red wall,” former industrial areas of England in which Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives have been making big inroads.Results announced early Friday gave the Labour candidate, Kim Leadbeater, a win of just 323 votes over her Conservative Party rival, Ryan Stephenson, after an acrimonious contest in Batley and Spen, one of Labour’s traditional heartland seats in northern England.Voting in the by-election took place on Thursday after a campaign marred by claims of intimidation, including one episode in which Ms. Leadbeater was heckled aggressively and another that led to the arrest of a man on suspicion of assault in connection with an attack on Labour supporters.Ms. Leadbeater acknowledged that it had been “a grueling few weeks” but added, “I am absolutely delighted that the people of Batley and Spen have rejected division and they voted for hope.”Labour fought hard to retain Batley and Spen, which was represented in Parliament by Ms. Leadbeater’s sister, Jo Cox, until she was murdered by a far-right fanatic in 2016.Ms. Leadbeater’s narrow path to victory was a complicated one. She was competing not only against the Conservative candidate, Mr. Stephenson, but also against Mr. Galloway, a former lawmaker and veteran left-wing campaigner who sought to divert support from Labour.Although Labour held off the challenge from Mr. Galloway, its share of the vote in Batley and Spen was lower than in the 2019 general election.Since the Brexit referendum in 2016, Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party has succeeded in winning over many of Labour’s core voters in working-class communities in the north and middle of England.Before the result in Batley and Spen, there had been news media speculation that Mr. Starmer would be vulnerable to a leadership challenge if Ms. Leadbeater lost, as many were expecting.Most analysts believed that Mr. Starmer would have been safe regardless of the result, because there is no credible alternative waiting in the wings. But the victory — narrow as it was — will be especially welcome news for the party leaders, because the contest could have been avoided.The by-election was triggered in May when the area’s former Labour lawmaker, Tracy Brabin, was elected to another job as West Yorkshire mayor, requiring her to step down from Parliament. Mr. Starmer was accused of mismanaging the situation and putting the seat at risk by allowing her to run for the mayoral position.Since he took the job of leader last year, Mr. Starmer, a former top prosecutor, has tried to unite the party after it was routed in 2019 parliamentary elections under the stewardship of Jeremy Corbyn, its left-wing leader at the time.Mr. Starmer’s critics have accused him of a lack of charisma and of failing to set out a convincing alternative policy agenda to that of the Conservatives.His defenders have appealed for patience and have contended that the pandemic has made it hard for the opposition to impress voters whose attention is focused on government efforts to bring Covid-19 restrictions to an end.In his election literature, Mr. Galloway had called on voters to abandon Labour to increase pressure on Mr. Starmer and force him out of his job.When the count was completed early Friday, Ms. Leadbeater won 13,296 votes, Mr. Stephenson was in second place with 12,973 and Mr. Galloway third with 8,264.Labour “won this election against the odds,” Mr. Starmer said. “And we did so by showing that when we are true to our values — decency, honesty, committed to improving lives — then Labour can win.” More

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      UK's Labour Party Reels After Panicked Response to Election Loss

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      The party leader, Keir Starmer, was seen as scapegoating a key aide, causing more turmoil in an already divided party after a disappointing performance in local elections. LONDON — Sober, cerebral and with the poise of the top-shelf lawyer he once was, Keir Starmer promised competence rather than charisma when he became leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party last year, following its crushing general election defeat in 2019.But his panicky response to last week’s poor local election results and a clumsy reshuffle of his top team have left his party in turmoil, diminishing his authority and raising doubts about whether Labour has a credible path back to power.Mr. Starmer found himself embroiled in fierce recriminations over local election results that, with smoother communication, could have been explained away as disappointing, but instead pointed to a deeper crisis.“The one thing Keir Starmer was supposed to be was competent,” said Steven Fielding, professor of political history at the University of Nottingham. “The election results were not good but they weren’t as bad as some people liked to present them. He completely messed up his reaction, and that highlights concerns about his ability to communicate.”Behind the latest setback lie profound structural changes in British politics, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson making deep inroads into former Labour heartlands in working class districts with a mixture of populist pro-Brexit politics and promises to bring jobs and prosperity.Jonathan Powell, who served as chief of staff to Tony Blair, Labour’s last election-winning prime minister, believes that critics are “massively over-interpreting” the local election results, adding: “The number of times I’ve read about the end of the Labour Party is legion.” However, he said, the Conservatives, under Mr. Johnson, have effectively fused left-wing economic policy with a right-wing appeal on cultural issues. The Labour Party, deprived of its traditional appeal to so-called “red wall” voters in the north and middle of the country on economic issues, now relies on liberals in ethnically diverse metropolitan areas, like London and Manchester.That is too small a base to win a national election, he said, and squaring those voters with Labour’s vanishing “red wall” constituency will be difficult. “Labour is trying to hold together university-educated liberal voters with the old Labour party voters that they’ve lost to the Tories,” Mr. Powell said. “They can’t stand on two horses going in different directions at the same time.”The scale of the challenge became clear last Friday when Labour lost a parliamentary by-election in Hartlepool, an economically struggling port town in the northeast of England. Labour had expected a defeat in this staunchly pro-Brexit region, because the seat would have been lost in the 2019 election had the Brexit Party not contested it and taken votes away from Mr. Johnson’s Tories.Prime Minister Boris Johnson with Jill Mortimer, who won the recent by-election in Hartlepool, once a Labour stronghold.Scott Heppell/Associated PressBut Labour recorded a lower vote than in 2019 and, grim faced, Mr. Starmer refused to comment as he left his London home on Friday morning. When he did surface later he gave an unconvincing, at times almost robotic, interview that took responsibility for the result but provided no detail on changes.The following day, just as a set of better results for Labour were being announced, news leaked out that Mr. Starmer was stripping his deputy, Angela Rayner, of key responsibilities.With an impressive personal story of succeeding against the odds, Ms. Rayner, who has said she left school at 16 while pregnant and with no qualifications, is not only a popular figure in the Labour Party but comes from the sort of community with which the party is trying to reconnect. So the backlash was swift and ferocious.“The scapegoat sacking of Angie Rayner contradicted everything Keir Starmer said only 48 hours ago about taking personal responsibility for election defeats and his promise a year ago that he would unite the party,” John McDonnell, the party’s former spokesman on the economy under its last leader, Jeremy Corbyn, said on Twitter.Some on the center and right of the Labour Party were unimpressed too, including the newly re-elected mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham. By late Sunday, Mr. Starmer had to beat an embarrassing retreat, ending up giving Ms. Rayner even more responsibilities, albeit away from campaigning.The humiliation seemed to encapsulate the disorientation of a Labour Party struggling to adapt to a world in which Mr. Johnson has not only stolen many of its traditional voters but also some of its redistributive, high-spending, political agenda.Unlike predecessors who presided over austerity, Mr. Johnson is promising to “level up” and bring jobs and prosperity to voters who feel ignored in the so-called red wall area that was once Labour’s electoral citadel.To many that may have sounded all the more attractive in the absence of a compelling message from Mr. Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions who often sounds as if he would be more at home in a courtroom than on a political stage.Following the 2019 general election defeat — Labour’s worst since 1935 — Mr. Starmer’s short-term strategy was to concentrate less on policy and more on detoxifying the party brand after its electoral disaster under his left-wing predecessor, Mr. Corbyn. Mr. Starmer has embraced the Jewish community, in contrast to Mr. Corbyn, whose leadership was dogged by allegations of anti-Semitism. Though he presents himself as a patriot, Mr. Starmer studiously avoids the culture-war issues that Mr. Johnson exploits, such as what to do with statues commemorating contested chapters in Britain’s history.Given that voters rarely care much about the policy platform of opposition parties until a general election is close, that looked like a sensible approach.Mr. Starmer at his office in London last week.Toby Melville/ReutersYet, while he should not have been expected to roll out a detailed policy agenda just 16 months after a general election, Mr. Powell said, Mr. Starmer “has to convince people he has a cause.” Mr. Blair did that effectively in the 1990s when he rebranded the party “New Labour,” embracing the free market and the European Union.Perhaps that did not seem urgent for Mr. Starmer, because voters normally use local elections and by-elections like those held last week to punish governments. His main campaign theme was to highlight claims Mr. Johnson broke electoral rules over the financing of a pricey refurbishment of his apartment.But Britons apparently ignored those goings on in Westminster, and with the country now emerging from Covid-19 restrictions seemed to reward politicians who controlled health policies. The ruling Scottish National Party in Scotland performed strongly, as did the governing Labour Party in Wales.In England, Mr. Johnson was forgiven for his chaotic early handling of the pandemic and rewarded for the country’s highly successful vaccination roll out.Not all is lost for Mr. Starmer, particularly when the entirety of last week’s results are taken into account. According to a BBC analysis projecting the local voting into a national vote share, Labour was seven points behind the Conservatives, hardly a good result but progress on the 12-point deficit recorded in the 2019 general election.With no credible challenger waiting in the wings, Mr. Starmer is unlikely to face any immediate threat to his leadership. Nonetheless, the speed with which critics attacked his reshuffle raises pressure on Mr. Starmer to at least identify a message that can appeal to two very different groups of Britons — the old working class stalwarts and the more youthful, liberal and better educated city dwellers.“Under Starmer it has been two steps forward and one step back,” said Mr. Fielding, “and he hasn’t addressed the problem of how you win back the red wall without losing metropolitan liberal voters.” More