Opinion | How Keir Starmer overwhelmed Britain’s Conservatives

Starmer might be the most underrated politician ever to secure such a sweeping triumph. Since becoming leader of Britain’s badly broken Labour Party in 2020, critics described him as lacking vision and charisma. They also chided him for adjusting his views to political circumstances and insisting on invoking workaday issues that voters care about rather than sweeping themes that ignite the faithful.

Almost all his alleged shortcomings turned out to be the virtues his party required and his country was seeking. Former prime minister Boris Johnson overflowed with charisma, but voters decided he wasn’t serious and was too prepared to bend the rules. The strait-laced Starmer, once the country’s chief prosecutor, offered himself as the antidote.

Too much ideology helped sink Labour in the 2019 elections under the leadership of firebrand Jeremy Corbyn. After securing the leadership by being sufficiently left-leaning, Starmer systematically purged his party, including of Corbyn himself, while pushing for moderate Parliamentary candidates and including middle-of-the-road voices for top jobs in his shadow cabinet.

Ideology also proved to be the bane of Conservatives, who have been declining in polls ever since Johnson’s violation of covid-19 restrictions came to light in his “Partygate” scandal. But vast swaths of the public gave up on the Tories entirely during the 44-day prime ministership of Liz Truss, when her proposals for radical tax-cutting spooked global financial markets.

Outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a more fiscally conventional conservative, seemed a reasonable corrective. But divisions in his party were too boisterous, and Sunak proved hapless. Calling an early election was his final miscalculation.

Never did a safe pair of hands look better. It says a great deal that two of Britain’s most market-friendly publications, the Economist and the Financial Times, uncharacteristically endorsed Labour. Everyone wanted “change.”

If underestimating Starmer was a mistake before the election, misjudging his chances of success would be equally unwise.

It’s true the problems Starmer confronts are daunting. Unlike Tony Blair, who came to power in another landslide in 1997 during good times, Starmer will be trying to right a deeply troubled economy. His core campaign promise was to speed economic growth — one reason he won far more nods of approval from business than Labour leaders usually do.

He chose not to win a mandate for sweeping policies. Instead, he campaigned on five popular — if broad — “missions”: high growth; safe streets; breaking down “barriers to opportunity”; turning Britain into a “clean energy superpower”; and making Britain’s National Health Service, hobbled by Conservative austerity, “fit for the future.” He even scaled back his clean-energy spending proposals, lest he give the Tories targets for charges of fiscal irresponsibility.

Yet the restrained nature of those promises suggests that Starmer grasps the challenges facing progressives of all stripes at this moment of entrenched mistrust of institutions, including government. And while he learned from Blair and ran as a moderate, Starmer is progressive and knows the limits of Blair’s old formulas.

One of Starmer’s obsessions is bringing working-class voters back to the Labour Party, which like social democratic parties elsewhere (and Democrats in the United States), has hemorrhaged many of its traditional lower-income loyalists. This is the fundamental riddle the left and center-left alike must solve.

“I grew up working-class,” he told his party conference last fall, pledging to govern on behalf of “working people in the parts of our country ignored, passed over, disregarded as sources of growth.” They have borne the burden of an “age of insecurity,” he declared, promising to ease it.

He opposed Britain’s departure from the European Union, which a majority of British voters now see as a mistake. But he did not promise it could be easily corrected. He knows the path back to a more rational policy toward Europe will take time and care on both sides of the English Channel.

This is a hard moment for politicians who are temperamentally moderate and philosophically progressive. The likely strength of the far right in France’s legislative election this Sunday will be a warning. Many of the voters Starmer won on Thursday are on loan, much as Johnson’s Tory majority in 2019 was built on a shallow foundation.

Starmer recognized that voters in all the democracies are skeptical of grand and gaudy promises. “People need hope,” he told the Financial Times, “but it needs to be realistic hope.” This is an excellent starting point for advocates of change.