Barring an extraordinary electoral turnaround, Sir Keir Starmer is about to join an elite club, which is even more pale, male and stale than the Garrick: Labour leaders who have won a majority in a general election. He will be only the fourth since the party first fielded candidates in a general election, after Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair.
The conventional wisdom about such victories – particularly about those achieved by Wilson and Blair – is that they are the fruit of Labour moderates taking control of the party from the left, thus reassuring the conservative-minded middle classes. You still see this narrative about Starmer surprisingly often. He is the safe centrist option, the return to sanity after the hard-left madness of the Corbyn era. And there is certainly some truth to this idea. Starmer is not a socialist of the old school, fixated on mass ownership of the means of production.

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