LIVERPOOL, England — Labour still isn’t sure Keir Starmer is a winner, but his top ranks think their best bet for staying in power is to try to make him one.
The British prime minister emerged from his annual party conference having stalled talk of his imminent defenestration, but doubts still remain that Starmer can see off the threat of the insurgent Reform UK’s Nigel Farage. Yet his keynote promise of “hope” at the end of the “hard road” even prompted enthusiastic cheers from his party faithful.
The problem for Starmer is that he is now different things to different people. He and his allies used the conference to signal a major overhaul of his strategy, tendering a more combative approach on the fringes of the Liverpool gathering this week.
Some see a pitch adjustment to appeal to more progressive pro-immigration voters jumping to the Lib Dems and Greens as the best bulwark against the insurgent Reform UK.
But there has also been an aggressive assault on Britain’s high immigration levels championed by newly appointed Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood which others believe remains crucial to Labour’s revival.
Both sides left Liverpool insisting he has their backs — for now.
Let’s Keir be Keir
Starmer began his make-or-break party conference with a boon to his progressive flank.
His curtain-raising BBC interview branding Farage’s immigration policies “racist” triggered a flurry of interventions from approving senior ministers and regional leaders, who followed suit, reasserting their liberal roots, and painting the next election in stark primary colors.
“Keir is right to call out the racist policy from today,” former leader Ed Miliband told a fringe meeting on Sunday.
“We haven’t done it enough. Self-evidently we haven’t done it enough,” the now-energy secretary said of efforts to counter the narrative the country’s problems were all to do with immigration.
He added: “What is the fucking point of politics? The point of politics is to go out and argue for things. The point of politics is to go out with ideals.”
For critics, uncomfortable with what they saw as Starmer’s inauthentic use of divisive language when he claimed the U.K. risks becoming an “island of strangers” in a speech in May, the PM’s BBC intervention was a welcome vibe shift.
“Let Keir be Keir. If our prime minister is actually saying what he thinks, isn’t that a good thing?” one minister, granted anonymity like others in this piece to speak candidly about Labour strategy, said.
“This is the real Keir Starmer. There’s a side of his personality that just wants to get his head down and get on with the job — but he’s clearly decided now that he’s up for the fight,” a second chimed in.
One Cabinet minister put it more dramatically.
Britain is “approaching a defining moment for our country, not just on the economy but the social fabric as well,” this person said. “This is a ‘what did you do in the war?’ moment.”
Conflicting messaging
But others caution against reading too much into Starmer’s headline-grabbing rhetoric.
One former Labour official, who remains in regular contact with Starmer’s team, said the “racism” intervention had not been planned, but a spur-of-the-moment response to a direct question. A third minister reflected a paradox — that while it was good for the prime minister to be himself, electorally it was probably the wrong call.
Voters “feel personally attached’ to Farage, and labelling him racist was tarring them with the same brush, a 2024 intake MP said, comparing the moment to Hillary Clinton’s infamous, and disastrous, “basket of deplorables” moment.
Biden 2.0
It is not just Starmer’s racism charge against Reform UK’s policies worrying some in his party.
Starmer declaration on Tuesday that Labour is in a “fight for the soul of the country” — echoing former U.S. President Joe Biden’s 2022 cry of a “battle for the soul of the nation” ahead of congressional midterm elections — is making some feel uneasy.
“We have a big decision to make. Do we do what the Democrats did?” said the third minister referenced above. “I’m honestly not sure what the answer is. MPs in North London will be happy but MPs in the north won’t be.” They added: “That’s 30 percent of the electorate voting for Reform. It’s a very big call.”
One Labour activist who worked on the Kamala Harris campaign in 2024 said they saw “alarming similarities” between how Starmer is shaping his campaign and how Biden did. “They are setting themselves as more against Reform rather than for something.” Also, running on democracy is “doomed to fail, unfortunately.”
Though the consensus is that Starmer has come out of conference stronger, the threat of May’s local elections remains on the horizon.
“That’s what we keep saying to them, we’re your midterms,” said one senior Labour official in one of the devolved administrations.
Like some in Starmer’s own ranks, Farage also sensed a political misstep, accusing the PM of inciting violence against his candidates and activists in a live broadcast on Tuesday designed to overshadow the Labour leader’s speech.
But Labour peer Maurice Glasman, founder of the socially conservative Blue Labour movement, played down its significance in the overall context of the conference.
His concerns the gathering would turn into a “re-tread of 1999” — when the socially liberal PM Tony Blair was in power — had been assuaged. It “hasn’t turned out that way at all,” he said heralding Mahmood’s “brave” speech on the importance of borders and sovereignty.
Starmer needed to be given the space to “grow,” he said, claiming it would have been “inconceivable” a year ago that the prime minister would have been talking about stopping the boats and appointing Mahmood as home secretary.
“Conference is very calm. All that noise has died down. It’s not let Keir be Keir the human rights lawyer. It is Keir the prime minister who promoted Shabana Mahmood to be home secretary,” he said.
Broad church
Starmer, whose political shape-shifting was crucial to his election as party leader in 2020, used his speech to argue for a return to the center ground, aiming his fire at opponents on both the right and left of politics who argue there lies a “quick fix” in tax cuts or wealth taxes.
“We can all see these snake oil merchants on the right, on the left, but be in no doubt, conference, none one of them have any interest in national renewal,” he said.
Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s top and closest aide has been on board with a more progressive pivot, one think tanker, who has a close relationship with No. 10 Downing Street, said.
“If you’re trying to be a government [for] the whole country, you can’t just focus on one particular region or one particular section of society. You’ve got to have a broad offer,” a second Cabinet minister said.
“It’s not just about starting in the middle and adding policies on the left and right until you reach breaking point and hold it together. It’s also about what’s underneath it. So it’s also about trust and competency,” they argued, noting that, on the polling question of who would be the better prime minister, Starmer still beats Farage.
Speaking at the Politico Pub on Tuesday Alan Milburn, former Secretary of State for Health in Tony Blair’s administration, described Starmer’s pitch as “an exposition of One Nation Labourism.”
Starmer had “obviously identified the enemy” with references to both the far right and far left.
“In one sense, that is a continuation of a tradition, which is a very New Labour thing about how do you build an electoral coalition that can win.
“I liked all that … my sense was it felt authentic here. There was a bit of fire in the belly,” he said.
Common enemy
Starmer was also helped by what was seen as leadership maneuvering from Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, who gave a series of highly critical interviews ahead of the party conference.
“In a weird way Andy has helped bring everyone together. The loyalty to the leader is deep. He’s overreached for sure,” one former Labour adviser still close to the government said of Burnham’s interventions.
Government ministers and their advisers spent much of the conference arguing in private that Burnham’s display of naked ambition on the eve of the conference only served to damage his standing.
“Andy has completely overshot his hand — we don’t do that kind of disunity,” the first Cabinet minister quoted above said.
“I don’t think we are the kind of party that’s going to do a Tory wobble,” this person added, alluding to the many acts of regicide performed by the Conservatives Party that Labour ousted last July.
All about delivery
Starmer’s team believe the best riposte to his detractors both within and outside the party will be the list of things he can show voters he has delivered, and the changes he has made to the way government works.
The PM started his hour-long speech championing the Hillsborough Law — which will impose a “duty of candour” on public officials, decades after state institutions covered up police failings that led to a fatal football stadium crush in 1989.
Attorney General Richard Hermer, Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy, Victims Minister Alex Davies-Jones and Starmer himself all worked on the law personally to move it from a version rejected by campaigners to one they would accept. It was, ministers argued, “delivery” in action.
Yet the narrative is often simply beyond No. 10’s control. One woman working on a food stall remarked that the PM “hates scousers” (people from Liverpool). She was, in fact, referring to a long-debunked deep fake audio purporting to be Starmer’s voice — which fooled even some senior Labour politicians when it first emerged. Reform UK is making inroads even in Liverpool, long a Labour stronghold.
One senior Labour politician said: “Not even Mother Theresa could have had a decent honeymoon.”
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