When he left Downing Street, after nearly a decade in power through two interrupted terms, Labor Harold Wilson expressed his main regret to the BBC political correspondent David Holmes: "I wish I could have been Prime Minister in happier times and easy."
It has been the fate of all left-wing governments in a country like the UK, where conservatism is the natural arena of things: to bring order to the wreck.
If the polls are correct, that will be the fate of Keir Starmer (London, 60 years old) when the polls are called again in 2024 -or before-, after 12 years of
Tory
dominance that have left the country in a critical situation.
EL PAÍS has spoken with members of Starmer's new team, with political analysts who see positive progress in his arrival at the party leadership and with staunch critics who reproach him for abandoning left-wing ideology.
This 2023 may be the year that consolidates the Labor leader as a possible and longed-for alternative in the eyes of millions of voters tired of the decline of the United Kingdom.
“After the 1983 defeat [Margaret Thatcher swept the polls and ushered in a successful second term], we had to go through the leadership of Neil Kinnock, John Smith and finally Tony Blair.
Fourteen years to reach a position where we could once again take power,” recalls Nick Thomas-Symonds, historian, lawyer, Labor MP and the party's current International Trade spokesman.
“Keir Starmer has managed to do it in three years, which is truly remarkable.
If after the 2019 defeat [Boris Johnson crushed Jeremy Corbyn] they had told me that Labor was going to have a 25-point lead in the polls today, I would not have believed it.
Starmer's arrival at the head of the Labor Party ended the turbulent era of Corbyn, who managed to attract thousands of young people with a radical turn to the left, but with which he also scared away millions of middle-class voters.
The way in which he then wandered and confused the most important issue facing a generation, Brexit, penalized Labor, which in 2019 achieved its worst result in more than 80 years.
Starmer, who had been the party's spokesman for everything related to leaving the EU — and the main advocate of holding a second referendum — managed to win the leadership of the party at the worst possible time.
Labor leader Keir Starmer takes a selfie with a group of women entrepreneurs at an event in Swindon, UK, on Nov. 18, 2022.Stefan Rousseau (PA Images/Getty Images) (PA Images via Getty Images )
The UK, like the rest of Europe, was entering the long night of the pandemic.
And Boris Johnson still enjoyed unchallenged popularity among citizens.
The new leader of the opposition had to make the victory speech in the cold of a television studio, due to the imposition of social distancing rules.
It was a prescient beginning, because the main criticism received by the Labor leader during these years has to do with a rigid and nondescript personality, which caused indifference in voters and conveyed a false sense of security to his conservative rivals.
“Those who know him don't find him boring or bland.
The people who have followed him closely and paid attention to him do not find him boring.
I believe that this perception is going to change gradually, and I do not believe, in any case, that it is such a relevant factor, if one takes into account that Sunak is not Mister Brilliant either, ”he defends in conversation with EL PAÍS Philip Collins, author some of the most brilliant speeches by former Prime Minister Tony Blair, a contributor to some of Starmer's rhetorical pieces and one of the most widely read political analysts in the UK today.
“Sunak is more serious than either Johnson or Truss were.
But tough times are ahead and it is going to be very difficult to govern well in the midst of a recession.
Any electoral push from the Conservatives stemming from the fact that Sunak is a respectable citizen will be more than offset by the fact that inflation is skyrocketing.
I don't think Labor will retain the advantage of more than 20 percentage points that the polls give it today when the time comes to vote, but I don't think Sunak is going to be a great electoral asset either ”, summarizes Collins.
"There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come," said the writer Victor Hugo.
And the moment is coming to Labor by shovelfuls, the result of a citizen's weariness with the Conservatives that is expressed in multiple signs of discomfort.
Strikes in transport, in public health, in education, in the fire brigade, even in the border control police.
Rage in the supermarket, with a cost of living crisis that is becoming unbearable for many citizens.
And a Brexit that nobody dares to talk about, but which has left the United Kingdom short of labor, with weakened foreign trade, a sharp increase in the price of basic goods and a country in continuous tension with its neighbors on the continent. .
The inequality generated during these years forces Starmer to practice a position that is not as central as Blair's and to push Labor a little further to the left.
“It's easy to compare different decades, but they both started from a different starting position,” explains Nia Griffith MP, who is also part of the current Labor leadership.
“We have had to recognize this great inequality and the damage it has caused to the country.
We have to climb a steep mountain and give people the tools to do it (...).
I think Starmer has known how to listen to the voters and understand their fears, ”she defends.
Starmer is aware of the hundreds of thousands of votes that in 2019 turned to conservatism in the north of England, the "red wall" that was Labor's historic stronghold for half a century, thanks to the anti-European populist discourse.
His strategy, assumed by a large part of the party and its powerful allies, the unions, is based on stopping looking back.
To remedy the damage, the first step is to admit that it was a majority of the citizens who decided that change.
“It was a smart move, because he had to show that he accepted the reality of Brexit before trying to change it.
You need to win back the voters who supported leaving the EU, so it's not a good idea to tell them over and over again that this was a disaster.
You have to let them be the ones who, in due course, realize it, ”explains Collins.
The move that time will determine whether or not she has been a teacher was to wrest their own slogans from the conservatives.
Take back control
(regain control), that war cry of the eurosceptics to defend Brexit, is now the motto used by the Labor leader to promise a more balanced distribution of power between the regions of the country.
Keir Starmer on a train journey to Yorkshire, UK, on November 10, 2022.Stefan Rousseau (PA Images/Getty Images) (PA Images via Getty Images)
The attorney-prosecutor method
Starmer, married with two children aged 14 and 12, lives in Kentish Town, north London.
He fiercely protects his family's privacy.
At six in the afternoon every Friday, except for unavoidable emergencies, he parks the Labor leadership and acts as father and husband.
They are beneficial reminiscences of a life before politics - he has been a deputy since 2015 -, although always linked to a commitment to public service.
As a human rights lawyer, he was involved in all the major left-wing lawsuits against Margaret Thatcher's neoliberal revolution.
The rumor that the writer Helen Fielding was inspired by the young Starmer to create the character of Mark Darcy in
Bridget Jones's Diary has never died down.
.
As director of the Crown Prosecution Service (equivalent to State Attorney General), for much of his tenure under a Conservative government, he was tempted to feed the tabloids and publicize himself with so-called headlines. tough on criminals.
As leader of the Labor Party, he initially chose to treat the Corbynists with a kid glove to preserve internal unity and initially embraced the 2019 electoral program (the most radical in recent decades, according to Corbyn).
It was a deliberate mirage.
Aware that the majority of the affiliates and supporters who voted for him in the primaries had not done so so that everything would remain the same, little by little he was releasing ballast and getting rid of the radicalism that still persisted in the ranks of the party.
The perfect occasion came with his harsh response to the accusations of anti-Semitism that the previous management had received.
Hard enough to end up expelling Corbyn himself from the parliamentary group, after the old leader responded with disdain and described as "exaggerated" the report of the Equality and Human Rights Commission that had pointed out specific discriminatory practices and attitudes within the match.
There will always be one more current to the left in Labour, as there was in 1997, the peak of Tony Blair
Simon Hannah, writer and trade unionist
“There will always be one more current to the left in Labor, as there was in 1997, the height of Tony Blair's time,” explains Simon Hannah, a writer, trade unionist, and part of that current at the party's extreme.
His book
From him A Party with Socialists in It. A History of the Labor Left
(A Party With Socialists In It: History of the Labor Left) is Labour's fiercest claim.
“But Corbynism is dead today.
Corbyn himself has been expelled, the most left-wing MPs are removed from the lists, Momentum [the activist organization that was key in the rise of the veteran left-wing leader] no longer has power and the motions successfully promoted in the congresses of the party for the most radical wing are deliberately ignored”, laments Hannah, while questioning the sincerity of Starmer's speech.
“When he competed in the primaries, he presented himself as a very left-wing candidate, without ceasing to talk about the workers' struggle.
And he pledged to preserve the 10 key proposals of the Corbyn era.
Either he lied or he has been weak, because he has not only abandoned those promises,
For a politician who intends, like his personal hero, Harold Wilson, to preserve at all costs the unity of a party with self-destructive and Cainite tendencies, the attempt to build an image and apparently moderate speeches has been complex, and sometimes thankless, which won't scare away the average voter.
Starmer's tempered and measured criticism of the Johnson government during the pandemic, only risqué in the final moments of a disastrous administration, garnered praise.
But they were of little use to him, because in a health crisis like that, no one was going to blame Downing Street for a catastrophe that caught leaders around the world by surprise.
More internal noise caused anecdotes such as the internal discourse handled at the beginning of 2021 by the Labor leadership, the result of the report commissioned by the Republic communication agency.
"Using the flag more, appearing alongside war veterans, dressing smartly at institutional events, etc., to give voters the feeling that we are aligned with true British values,"
said some of the recommendations of a text that fitted like a glove to Starmer's always neat appearance—dark suit, red tie, sculpted razor hair and parting on one side pulled with square.
The confirmation, according to the most critical within the party, that the leader was all form and nothing substance.
“In the last three or four months, maybe since last summer, I have found more and more of these undecided voters, the ones you knock on their door on the campaign trail, who have told me that they thought this Starmer guy was a nice guy.
He is beginning to be well known among our electorate ”, defends the deputy Ruth Cadbury, who was part of Corbyn's leadership and is now integrated into that of the new leader.
Starmer's resistance and tenacity, under that appearance of kindness, good manners and rejection of any conflict, comes from afar.
The son of a toolmaker and a nurse, he was educated in the small town of Oxted, in Surrey.
Her mother suffered throughout most of her life from Still's disease, a rare and painful type of inflammatory arthritis that forced her to spend long periods of time in hospitals.
Josephine Starmer, a staunch Labor voter, like her husband, died two weeks before her son was first to take the MP's seat.
"The steroids and the disease jointly caused him to not be able to walk, move his arms or even speak during the last few years," Starmer has recounted on one of the rare occasions in which he shows the media his privacy.
He has a leathery, left-wing soul, preserved through a meritorious academic career—so peculiar in the UK—that took him to Reigate
grammar school
, to Reigate University from Leeds (Human Rights) and from Oxford (Civil Law), until he became a barrister.
But above all, Starmer wants Labor to return to power, after a long journey through the desert that began at the same time as the financial crisis of 2008. That is why he has kept at his side, and empowered, the economist Rachel Reeves, who He worked in the Bank of England's research service and has given solidity and solvency to the party's economic program.
Her responses to each recent conservative budget outrage have been swift and to the point.
And she has consolidated in her boss, Starmer, a very convenient image of fiscal responsibility, after the disaster caused by the historic tax cut - with reverse gear - of the ill-fated former Prime Minister Truss.
“I am determined to reduce the debt.
Each of my measures will be accompanied by detailed and justified expenses ”,
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