Keir Starmer has set out his pitch for the Labour leadership with a call for his party not to lurch to the right as a result of last week’s devastating election result.

While the leadership race has not yet formally been launched, the shadow Brexit secretary confirmed to the Guardian that, as widely expected in Westminster, he was “seriously considering” running to succeed Jeremy Corbyn.

In a wide-ranging interview, Starmer said Labour did not do enough to tackle the Conservatives’ central election pledge to “get Brexit done” nor sufficiently deal with antisemitism, and urged his party to return to being a “broad church”.

He insisted Labour could win the next general election; but only if it sticks to its values. “There’s no hiding from it. It is a devastating result, but it’s important not to oversteer. The case for a bold and radical Labour government is as strong now as it was last Thursday. We need to anchor ourselves in that,” he said.

“I want trust to be restored in the Labour party as a progressive force for good: and that means we have to win. But there’s no victory without values.”

He said these include opposing “the moral injustice of poverty, inequality, homelessness” while advocating for internationalism and human rights.

Starmer was given few opportunities to speak for his party during the election campaign as Labour strategists sought to dodge the fraught question of Brexit. But he believes he could have made a better job than Corbyn of criticising the central claim of the Tories’ campaign.

“I don’t think we tackled the ‘get Brexit done’ slogan strongly enough,” he said. “We should have taken it down. Frankly I’d have liked the opportunity to have done it.”

He also echoed the view that the Labour manifesto represented a “policy overload”. “We had important things, housing and public sector pay rises, but you couldn’t see the wood for the trees,” he said.

“My fear is that they have a majority now to do pretty much as they like. They have a leader who I don’t think has any moral compass, I don’t think there’s anywhere he won’t go to stay in power. I think they have a leader who has made all sorts of promises he’s never going to be able to keep, and he will distract from his own failures by attacking those that are already the most vulnerable in our society.”

Starmer, whose remain stance was partly blamed by some allies of Corbyn, including Unite general secretary Len McCluskey, for losing Labour the election, conceded that the argument for a referendum had been “swept away” by the election result.

But he said his party must not give up the fight against the Conservatives. “The Brexit debate changes,” he said. “We will leave in January and the argument will have to be about the type of deal that we have with Europe: and we will argue, as we argued before, for a deal that protects our economy, protects our jobs, and working standards, the environment and consumers. That is really important.”

He also criticised the “baggage” Labour took into the election campaign. “We didn’t deal with antisemitism and that became a question of values and a question of competence,” he said, blaming “factionalism” for the failure to tackle the issue.

“Instead of being seen as a moral issue, where you were judging what people had said, the question became ‘what side are you on?’ It got tangled up. Frankly there’s been too much factionalism.”

This is perhaps his strongest critique of the party’s outgoing leader, whom Starmer is still careful to praise for setting a radical course and making anti-austerity a crusading issue.

He said Labour must now return to being a “broad church” and praised Momentum as well as “people who might self-identify as Blairites”. “It can’t be a fight for one side to obliterate the other,” he said.

Rebecca Long-Bailey, widely considered the continuity candidate in the leadership election, is likely to pitch herself on the left of the political spectrum as a Corbynite. But Starmer suggested such labels are unhelpful.

“I don’t think anybody would call me a Corbynista, but I’m a socialist,” he said. “I don’t need somebody else’s name tattooed on my head to know what I think.

“A Labour party that strays too far from its values, loses. In the end, the Labour party strayed too far from its values between 1997 and 2010,” he said, citing the Iraq war and the failure to reduce inequality.

Different errors were made by the party in its opposition years, he added. “In 2010, we thought because they’d won the election, they’d won the argument about austerity – they hadn’t. We thought in 2015 because they’d won the election, they’d won the argument about welfare – they hadn’t. We mustn’t make that mistake again.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rebecca Long-Bailey is widely considered to be the leadership’s favourite to succeed Jeremy Corbyn. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Starmer defended himself against accusations from his critics that he is too middle-class to speak to the heartlands and too lawyerly to connect with voters.

“My dad was a toolmaker and my mum was a nurse. And not everybody knows that and that’s because I don’t say it very often,” he said, adding his father wouldn’t have trumpeted it. “His pride came not from the fact that he worked in a factory, but from the fact that because he worked in a factory, his son could go to university, and become a lawyer. So the middle class background just doesn’t wash.”

He also described his late mother’s almost lifelong struggle with the debilitating and chronically painful Still’s disease, which left her in a wheelchair. “She was unable to eat or speak. And she never spoke, before she died, to our children … She wouldn’t have moaned. If you’d asked her how she was, she’d say, ‘fine, how are you?’”

Starmer said half his time as a lawyer was spent doing pro bono work for people who needed his assistance. He cited a life-saving, decades-long project to get rid of the death penalty in the Caribbean and in Africa. “That was work done for free, out of a deep sense of cause … Politics can be done in many different ways and many different forms.”

Famously, he assisted Dave Morris and Helen Steel in the “McLibel” case. Less well known is that he was on the picket line at Wapping “as a legal observer, but in the middle of the crowd as the horses were charging towards us,” and brought numerous cases against the Blair government. “I’m sure actually Blair would disown me.”

Though he lacks heartland credentials, “the leader of the opposition has to speak for all of England, and Scotland, and Wales, and Northern Ireland,” he said.

He said it was “undeniably true” that he could be running for Labour leader at a time when many believe the role should be filled by a woman.

“And there will be very good women candidates in this race, we know that. If I am in this race, it will be because of the ideas I want to put forward, and my determination that the Labour party can be a force for good and can bring about radical change. To get from where we are to where we need to be in four and a half years is a mountain to climb. This is not going to be done by one person alone, it is a team effort.”



• This article was amended on 14 & 18 January 2020 because an earlier version referred to Starmer defending the Helen Steel and Dave Morris in the McLibel case. To clarify: Starmer assisted them during the trial and appeal in the English courts and represented them at the European court action against the UK government which ended in 2005. But Steel and Morris famously defended themselves throughout the litigation in England which spanned 9 years.



