Labour's last chance

So it’s over. The expected has happened and Labour has the new leader we have known was coming since early polling showed it was a slam dunk. Sir Keir Starmer has taken decisive control of the party with a number of symbolic sackings. Out go Ian Lavery, Jon Trickett and Barry Gardiner. In come Annalise Dodds — the first woman to ever hold the role of Shadow Chancellor and Rachel Reeves, who (despite being bizarrely labelled as soft left in the Times) comes from Labour’s centrist wing and is a trusted pair of hands.

It wasn’t, however, an ideological reshuffle. It was a repudiation of Corbyn’s style more than his politics. Keir’s first act in sending a letter to the Board of Deputies showed that his leadership is about being the grownup in the room. Labour are not a party of protest any more. Some will mourn that. But as they discovered to their cost in December, too few would vote for it.

Starmer will make mistakes — everyone does. But at the moment he has a great deal of good will and leeway. Ignore the noises on Twitter. He won in the first round, handily. The membership was never really the hard left of the Corbyn imagination. They were just inspired by something different and then felt he hadn’t been treated fairly. The mistake he made, and the mistake his outriders still make, is in treating that as a mandate to act like Maduro.

Corbyn has gone, but Labour still has a lot of work to do to regain the trust of the nation. Waking up today and realising that it doesn’t matter that Corbyn has retweeted praise from a crank is a relief. But the country will take longer to forgive us than we might think. The hurt runs deep. In the Jewish community. Among those who we let down over Brexit. Among those who simply believed the country deserved a better opposition. There will be much to prove.

Keir Starmer has made a strong start. But these are incredibly difficult times. There will be no national tour of unity. We can’t gather together, so it will be impossible for Starmer to build up the library of stock images of him talking to adoring crowds. He’s having to learn to be a different type of leader in a different kind of time. The PM is in hospital. The country is in lockdown. The leader of the opposition can’t really oppose — only support the government in its efforts. How do you build an opposition under such circumstances?

The Labour Party made a decision this weekend to stop being self-indulgent. But that in itself won’t be enough. Labour needs a new narrative. It can’t return either to Corbynism or Blairism. Neither are right for this moment. The party has a chance now to repurpose and understand how to make sure its socialism is relevant to a country that has rejected it. That means listening humbly to what went wrong and fighting hard to improve on it.

Keir has sold himself to the membership as a honourable heir to Corbyn — as a left wing fighter who understands how to fight the system from within. The next few weeks and months will be the most testing of his life — that goes for the Labour Party too. This is a second chance. It may be the last.