Starmer’s not for turning

Labour has, by most accounts, had something of a rocky summer. The policy that dominated the media was scrapping winter fuel allowance for all but the poorest pensioners, with promises of more hard times to come in the Budget this Autumn.

The garnish for that main course was a parade of low-level stories about infighting in Number 10, gifts and hospitality, and a government that often feels more like it’s approaching its tenth year in power rather than its first hundred days.

Keir Starmer’s conference speech was, then, a chance to reset the narrative of the new Labour government – to pivot away and set up a new story for the rest of the year. It is a chance that Keir Starmer deliberately and roundly rejected.

If there was an overarching narrative to Starmer’s first conference speech as prime minister – and that is very much an open question – it is that Labour will stay the course it is already following. Media criticism of the party over gifts and hospitalities was referred to obliquely as a distraction, much like Labour’s left flank and the Greens.

The broad brush stays the same. Labour’s goal is restoring “respect” to politics, an argument hammered home with all the subtlety of a maniacal blacksmith – Starmer simply said the word 13 times in the course of his speech. Things will be “hard” and “difficult”, he reminded us. The country is in a mess. He knows how to fix it, and we’ll have to wait for the details on that some other time.

Even that narrative, limited as it is, could only really be pieced together by watching Starmer’s speech back afterwards. In the moment, Starmer instead delivered – making it very obvious he was reading out an autocue – a grab bag of key lines aimed at different audiences.

If ChatGPT was asked to write a conference speech with applause lines for the hall, for Reform voters, for Brexiteers, and six other subgroups, it would’ve churned out something like what Starmer said from the stage.

Starmer announced a “Hillsborough bill” introducing a duty of candour for public officials (this will inevitably prove a headache as it goes through parliament and after), the best applause line of the speech. Later there was a section distinguishing the summer rioters from those with legitimate immigration concerns. At one stage, Starmer clunkily borrowed Vote Leave’s “Take Back Control” line. It didn’t land.

Even the one moment of levity, in which Starmer mistakenly called for the return of the “sausages” rather than the “hostages” to Israel, showed up the clunkiness of the speech: the mention of the crisis felt like another thing that had to be ticked off the 45-minute-long list. Fumbling it could get a chuckle because the delivery of the moment as intended was already far too flat.

It can be argued that Starmer’s speech was essentially a show of strength. It contained no concessions, no change of course, not much of anything – it was his way Starm of saying he doesn’t need to panic yet, and so he isn’t. Starmer has his huge majority, has his mandate, and has his agenda. He’s going to keep doing what he’s been doing.

The speech was not one for the ages. There’s little that will clip out of it and as a whole it’s hardly the stuff of rhetoric, even if his writers have tried to polish it up to give the sense of an overarching message when there isn’t one there. It’s not a triumph, but it’s certainly not a disaster – yes, “sausages” was an unfortunate gaffe but there were no Theresa May moments here.

If, in a year’s time, it looks like Labour actually had a plan and the mood is better, all will be well. But if not, Starmer is left still needing to prove that he’s capable of delivering when the chips are down – because sometimes getting through a speech without disasters simply won’t be enough.