Starmer, Keir

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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