Is it time for Keir Starmer to forget about uniting his party?

Campaigning to become Labour leader last year, Keir Starmer said Harold Wilson was his favourite party leader of the last fifty years because he had unified the party. This was hardly a coincidence as putting an end to ‘factionalism’ was then one of Starmer’s main promises to Labour members. Subsequently Starmer has name checked Wilson in various speeches, especially noting his predecessor’s electoral success – and repeating his 1962 claim that Labour was ‘a moral crusade or it is nothing.’

From these references, Wilson who died in 1995 emerges (and so, presumably was the intention, also Starmer) as a man of principle and an election winner: what’s not to like? But what’s the evidence that Starmer can – or indeed should – emulate his hero?

When he resigned as leader in 1976, Wilson was actually reviled across the party: by the right for being unwilling to confront the left and by the left for pursuing the policies of the right.