Pragmatic Values

What I think Keir Starmer - The Biography,along with Reeves' Mais Lecture, show about how Labour could govern (and what the obstacles to that might be)

I voted for Keir Starmer to be leader of the Labour Party. I didn’t do so particularly enthusiastically or for particularly factional reasons. There were two key drivers to this decision.

Firstly, I was impressed with the team he had assembled around him - which included talent from across the party including both Simon and Kat Fletcher - two people who had served Corbyn but who I also knew to be talented and frustrated with the shortcomings of that administration as well as a more obvious cast of former Blair advisors. This wasn’t me voting for a unity ticket as such - though that was Starmer’s main pitch to the party. This was about a sense of the man recognising talent and understanding the need to put talent over faction.

Secondly, and probably more trivially, despite my desperately wanting to vote for a woman (and starting the contest thinking I would vote for Lisa Nandy who I have long admired as a political thinker) I couldn’t vote for anyone who signed a pledge that would have had women like me thrown out of the party. I’m self-defeating - I’m on the Soft Left after all - but I’m not that self-defeating.

Ironically, if this year goes as expected, this will be first time a Labour leader I have voted for is elected Prime Minister. And yet, I still have moments - some of them printed here - where I have significant misgivings about the Starmer project.

I think that’s good - especially when it comes to this newsletter. I don’t really know what my place in the journalistic firmament is, but I don’t think I help anyone as an unalloyed cheerleader or as a purely pessimistic sceptic. So I believe that this sense of supporting Starmer in general, but with misgivings probably helps me to be a better interpreter of Labour’s approach and politics more widely.

A lot of people I know are quite pessimistic. Not about Labour’s chances of winning but of their chances of doing much with that victory that is worthy of the moment and the needs of Britain. I have, at times, been one of them. But I have come away from the Starmer biography and the Reeves speech feeling both that I understand their approach more and with more optimism about the ambition that drives it.