Keir Starmer has a good story to tell — and he does it well. Let’s hear more of it

Keir Starmer has – after 17 months, 25 days and two hours – finally been able to make a big speech in a hall full of people. And what a difference that made to his performance. 

That he has had to wait so long to properly introduce himself has been a frustration for him and for Labour. His TV appearances can often appear stilted and too formal. So I was not expecting the kind of delivery we saw yesterday at the Brighton Labour Party Conference. It was well-paced, confident and intimate. Keir showed that he can be a good storyteller. We will need to see more of this on TV and at the despatch box. But now we know he has it in him – we didn’t before. There will be expectations. 

Starmer came on to the strains of local boy Fat Boy Slim’s “Right Here, Right Now”. That was in itself a statement of intent. This wasn’t a speech about the past. This was an introduction to Keir the man and the top level vision of the party he wants to lead. 

He did nod to two of his predecessors. With his high-level focus on education, he invoked the spirit of Tony Blair, who achieved so much domestically. He also listed those New Labour achievements, celebrating a past that has been scorned for the last five – if not ten – years. 

Less celebrated was his immediate predecessor. He didn’t mention him by name. He didn’t have to. This wasn’t a speech about Jeremy Corbyn or Labour’s past. But in welcoming Dame Louise Ellman – who had left the Party over anti-Semitism and rejoined when conference passed the EHRC measures – he made very clear that he was turning a page on Party culture. Even clearer was the scorn with with he spoke of the last manifesto not being a serious programme for government. 

This, of course, was not popular with everyone. There was a small minority of petulant protestors in the hall. But if you want an image of where Corbynism is today, picture a failed reality show contestant, shouting incoherently and without being heard, being drowned out by a party, the vast majority of whom want to move on. Keir’s pre-prepared line of Conference: “Shouting slogans or changing lives?” brought the hall to its feet and showed an appetite for government that Labour may have been lacking recently, but felt very much back throughout this conference. 

He also used his own past, as the country’s leading prosecutor, to reassure the country on Labour’s approach to crime and security – something the Party had allowed to fall off a cliff in the Corbyn years. Any other candidate would have struggled to make this case. But Starmer had families of victims he had worked with front and centre, both in the speech and physically in the audience. He was introduced by Baroness Doreen Lawrence, but also present were the parents of Jane Clough, who was murdered by a former partner. 

The speech, admittedly, was too long. Keir does have a brevity problem. I realise that it was – in essence – two-years-worth of speeches rolled into one, but that still doesn’t excuse it being 90 minutes long. He will have to learn to be more pithy. 

For me, the personal and vision sections worked significantly better than the policy section. While, of course, policy is vital, there was so much packed into that section that nothing really stood out. This has been one of the major problems of the Starmer leadership. People constantly complain the Party has no policy, but the opposite is true. There is tonnes of policy – but the Party is incredibly bad at announcing and selling it. In part, precisely because there is  too much. If Keir had stuck to the “why” of policies like the Green New Deal and his vision for education, this would have been a stronger – and shorter – speech. 

Keir spoke emotionally of his mother’s illness (and the heckling at that point was a sheer disgrace). He spoke of his father’s work ethic – bringing the lessons he learned of care and compassion, hard work and pride in it to what it means to be Labour. He also showed his human side, not just in his own emotional story but also in a sense of humour not previously revealed. He told a rather risqué joke about Boris Johnson that was genuinely funny. That’s rare in a speech like this. 

Labour still has a mountain to climb, and Keir has work to do, to convince the country that he is the right man to lead it out of the multitude of crises that more than a decade of the Tories has brought us to. This was a good start. Let’s see if Labour can build on it. 

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