The triumph of Labour’s centrists

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.