'This may be the moment Keir Starmer won the battle to be the party of change'
Is Starmer proving to be a lucky general?
You may not think having a protestor storm the stage the moment you start speaking as an act of good fortune but, in the end, it played in Starmer’s favour. Those who take only a cursory interest in politics will have seen how the Labour leader remained calm, handled the situation with dignity and was quick enough to turn the situation his advantage by making the point that Labour was now a party serious about power, not protest.
These are not bad optics for a Prime Minister in waiting. They’re a threads you can pull from the canvas of his speech. Some will have wanted more policy, others will question whether he should have done more to address concerns about migration or social care.
Yet that was not Starmer’s purpose in what was a coherent address that was primarily a piece of story telling. Starmer’s narrative was that government is broken but the spirit of the British people is not. At its heart was a cleverly-crafted argument for the role government’s can play in improving people’s lives.
In his words the big state had rarely sounded less menacing or more benign. In his sights were not just the Tories, they are so blatantly useless they could be despatched with ease, but a more dangerous enemy: cynicism.
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The Labour leader’s mission was to convince people Labour can make a difference, that politicians are not all the same and governments can deliver on their promises. There is, he almost said, an alternative. You can have a government that serves the country, not its party. It is possible to use the power of the state for the greater good.
Labour, he reminded voters, had done it before under Clement Attlee in 1945, under Harold Wilson in 1964 and under Tony Blair in 1997. The success of the speech was not the way Starmer drew inspiration from the past but the way he owned the future. Under Labour the country could speed ahead, he said.
This is what should rattle the Tories. This was perhaps the moment Starmer won the battle to be the party of change. The Tories are seeking to fight a presidential-style general election based on polling which shows Sunak is marginally more popular than his party while Starmer is marginally less popular than his.
Time will tell but Starmer probably helped his approval ratings yesterday. Perhaps the strongest part of his speech was the conviction with which he delivered these final lines: “We have to be disciplined. Focused. Ready to fight back. And confident, conference, because we have come so far, already.
“We’ve dragged this party back to service. We can do the same for politics. “I grew up working class. I’ve been fighting all my life. And I won’t stop now. “I’ve felt the anxiety of a cost-of-living crisis before. And until your family can see the way out, I will fight for you.”
The dividing line with jet-set Sunak was obvious but it was the passion, a quality not normally associated with Starmer, which stood out. The scent of power has woken Labour from its slumbers but it has also invigorated its leader.
We knew the earnest and dependable Starmer existed, we had rarely glimpsed this other side of his character. The protestor did not need to shower glitter on the Labour leader - his speech showed he can sparkle.
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