by Jonathan Todd

Bookmakers have Keir Starmer as the 7/19 favourite to be the next Labour leader – a 73% probability. In a party whose membership was swollen by Jeremy Corbyn, and which was largely loyal to him, Starmer did not enter the race as Corbyn’s presumed heir apparent. With early personal branding, Rebecca Long-Bailey carried this torch.

“No surrender, a 4-day week, and a 3-day bender,” proclaimed her supporters. Dancing on the political graves of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Zarah Sultana derided “40 years of Thatcherism” in her maiden speech in the Commons. Long-Bailey said “no surrender” by having Sultana speak at her campaign launch a few days later. It takes the same defiance to think a 4-day week a sensible policy commitment from Labour – from the perspective of hard-pressed workers, it challenged free broadband as the most otherworldly of Labour’s 2019 pledges.

You’d need a 3-day bender for this continuity Corbynism to make sense. After which, the breweries will be nationalised, and the beer will be free. Or, at least, Labour might commit for it to be so. But incredible commitments from opposition change little. They might get some in opposition more drunk, but the real effect is to help keep the Tories in government in perpetuity.

Such folly should, therefore, be debarred by rule 3 of our rule book (“promote the election of Labour Party representatives at all levels of the democratic process”). But the extent to which the membership has an appetite for continuity Corbynism remains unclear. If that appetite remains unsatiated, it will carry Long-Bailey, now benefitting from the formidable endorsement of Unite, to the leadership.

We cannot consistently criticise both Long-Bailey for making insufficient accommodation with the electorate and Starmer for being too accommodating of the membership. Yet there are those who see Starmer’s campaign launch video as overly tailored to traditional Labour themes. This would be a valid criticism if this were a general election and he were seeking to convince the general public. Starmer is calibrating his message to his audience – precisely what the uncompromising Corbyn was criticised for not doing and the “no surrender” mindset threatens to maintain.

Instead what should be taken from Starmer’s video is the impressive length and texture of his professional experience. While politics needs people with such experience, it seems increasingly rare. “Never had a proper job” is not something that can be said of Starmer.

“Looks like a prime minister” should, hopefully, be the more usual reaction. Which Ed Miliband rarely elicited, and Jeremy Corbyn even less frequently did. Few could close their eyes and see them in Number 10 – at least not without breaking into a cold sweat.

If Starmer can – as it feels to me, he would – walk, talk and chew gum like a prime minister as leader of the opposition, it is a massive step forward for Labour. The most telling polling questions invariably involve leadership. Corbyn’s terrible polling was, for example, a harbinger of Labour’s worst general election result since 1935.

Everything else is a composite of views on leadership. When asked for views on, say, the economic policies of a party, voters are partly giving their opinion on these policies and partly on the competency of the leader to deliver these policies.

A leader who looks like a plausible prime minister gets Labour back in the game. Faced with this prospect, as well as the daunting challenges of smoothly exiting the UK from its most important international alliance and “levelling up” the underperforming parts of the UK economy in the face of strong structural headwinds, own goals from Boris Johnson can’t be ruled out.

Winning goals from Labour will rediscover the recipe of our greatest successes. New Labour had old roots in that 1997 looked like 1945 and 1964: Labour as the vanguard of an optimistic, future-focused national project. More bringing the country together, less bashing ideological deviants. A big tent, not a narrow church.

Those that say that Starmer starts from too left-wing a position to lead such a national renewal should recall that Blair, soft left during the 1980s, campaigned for the party leadership on a pledge to oppose rail privatisation and Harold Wilson first came to public prominence by resigning from Attlee’s government for not being left-wing enough.

Starmer also has the potential to move from the left to mainstream national leadership. There will, though, necessarily be ducking and weaving along the way. Not least to secure the leadership in the first place.

The bookmakers imply about a one-in-four chance that he doesn’t make it to leader. If, instead, we embrace continuity Corbynism, we might do even worse at the next election. While Lisa Nandy has won plaudits for offering a different way forward, her chances of victory remain slim. If Nandy pushes Long-Bailey into third place, it would serve as a strong rejection of what Long-Bailey represents.

Only Starmer, however, now seems capable of winning decisively. Such a victory against the candidate of continuity Corbynism would be a powerful signal of a new direction and mandate for change. It is time to grant Starmer that victory.

Jonathan Todd is Deputy Editor of Labour Uncut

Tags: hard left, Jeremy Corbyn, Jonathan Todd, Keir Starmer, Labour leadership election 2020, Rebecca Long-Bailey