Keir Starmer starts talks with civil service to prepare for Labour government
Keir Starmer is set to kick-start crucial talks with the civil service to prepare the ground for a possible Labour government.
The Labour leader's team confirmed they had written to the Cabinet Secretary Simon Case to begin the process.
It came as the Tories sunk to their lowest levels in the polls since the debacle of ex-PM Liz Truss's short-lived government. A YouGov survey found a staggering 27-point lead for Labour just days after a separate poll pointed to a 1997-style defeat for Mr Sunak's warring party.
The talks between Labour's top team and senior Whitehall officials are designed to ensure a smooth overnight transition if the Tories are booted out of No10 at the election. It is understood the "access talks" could begin before the end of January and it is likely Mr Starmer's chief-of-staff Sue Gray will coordinate the process.
A Labour Party spokeswoman said: " Keir Starmer has today written to the Cabinet Secretary to begin the access talks process." The imminent talks also came as Mr Stamrer insisted he never thought his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn would win the 2019 general election - despite serving in his shadow cabinet.
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In an interview for ITV programme Keir Starmer: Up Close - Tonight, he said: "I didn't think the Labour Party was in a position to win the last election. I didn't obviously vote for Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 or 2016. On the contrary, I resigned."
Pressed on the issue, he added: "I thought that once that 2016 Brexit referendum had happened, I took the view that what then followed in the next few years was going to be felt for generations. And that I thought it was my responsibility to play a full part in that."
Mr Starmer, who provoked a backlash last month for praising Margaret Thatcher in a Telegraph article, also said he believes she tore communities apart. In comments that enraged parts of his party, the Labour leader hailed the divisive former Tory PM for “setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism”. But speaking to ITV's fly-on-the-wall programme, he said: "What she did was a clarity of mission and purpose. But actually what she did was very destructive."
He also insisted he has "no skeletons in the closet" from his time in charge of the Crown Prosecution Service ahead of the election.
While he admitted there were "mistakes", the Labour leader said: "If they [the Tories] want to attack me for decisions when I was director of Public Prosecutions, we had 7000 staff, we made nearly a million decisions a year. Will there be mistakes there? Of course there will, but there’ll be no smoking gun, no skeletons in the closet."
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