In his first speech from the Downing Street lectern, Sir Keir Starmer was setting out to reaffirm those qualities that won him the election. That was a relatively low bar to clear – he just had to give the impression that he was neither a crook nor a maniac – and he cleared it with ease. Here was a solid, sensible, ostentatiously humble speech delivered with persuasive but unshowy emotion.
Starmer was punctilious about showing grace in victory. Just a few days ago, he was deriding Rishi Sunak as a selfish chancer who had enriched himself ‘betting against Britain’ in his financial career; today, he was keen to ‘pay tribute’ to the outgoing PM’s ‘dedication and hard work’, and to the ‘extra effort’ that will have gone into earning a place as the first British-Asian PM. It was an appropriate response to Sunak’s equally gracious speech of concession.
Sir Keir opened his speech with a forceful if conventional molossus (three stresses in a row) ‘this great nation’. And he did, in the very subtlest way possible, seek to channel Barack Obama in his red-state/blue-state era. There were those repeated references to ‘hope’, and that stated determination to serve people even if they did not vote for him: ‘Whether you voted Labour or not – in fact, especially if you did not – I say to you directly: my government will serve you.’ On the surface, a bromide; underneath, an earnest display of his intention to try to win back those voters who peeled off Labour and cast ballots for Reform.
But he kept the rhetorical fireworks to a minimum; even going so far as to cast doubt on the trustworthiness of Downing Street orations in general. In the past ‘nurses, builders, drivers, carers, people doing the right thing, working harder every day’, he said, have been ‘recognised at moments like this before, yet as soon as the cameras stopped rolling their lives are ignored. I want to say very clearly to those people: not this time [another solid three-stresser]’.
The only slightly bathetic note he struck was warning that ‘when the gap between the sacrifices made by people and the service they receive from politicians grows this big, it leads to a weariness in the heart of a nation, a draining away of the hope, the spirit, the belief in a better future that we need to move forward together’. As he said ‘this big’, he put his hands nipple-distance apart like an angler recalling a slightly unimpressive catch. Best to have dispensed with the hand gesture altogether: it made ‘this big’ look not very big, but stretching his hands right out as wide as they’d go would have looked even more ridiculous.
His metaphors were restrained. We were briefly at sea – ‘no matter how fierce the storms of history, one of the great strengths of this nation has always been our ability to navigate away to calmer waters’ – then in a dark room (‘changing a country is not like flicking a switch’) then on a building site (‘brick by brick, we will rebuild the infrastructure of opportunity’). But those little flares of figurative language trod as lightly on the audience as Sir Keir promises his government will do.
The theme of Sir Keir’s speech was ‘public service’ (he used ‘service’ or its cognates nine times in just a few minutes) and the soundbites – which he stressed with unhurried confidence – all underscored that theme: ‘Dedication and hard work‘; ‘public service is a privilege‘; ‘country first; party second’.
His implicit contrast was with the ‘noisy performance’ and ideological obsessions which, in his account of it, led to ‘a weariness in the heart of a nation’. Here was to be a government, by contrast, ‘unburdened by doctrine’ (as much of a jab at the Corbynites, this, as at the Tories).
A wordcloud of the speech would see expressions like ‘calm and patient’, ‘respect and dignity’, ‘stability and moderation’ take pride of place. He made the conventional appeal to ‘actions, not words’, and called for patience and good faith. He would defy those committed to a narrative of national decline – but defy them ‘quietly’.
The shaping of the audience, too, was conventional and solidly done. The speech made the classic pronoun shift from ‘I’ to ‘we’, embracing his audience with the closing invitation to unity, and the call to action: ‘I invite you all to join this government of service in the mission of national renewal. Our work is urgent, and we begin it today.’
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