If you’re a pro-Remain Labour member angry that the conference yesterday voted narrowly – and chaotically – to maintain the party’s ambiguity on Brexit, where do you go? A number of shadow cabinet members are hoping they can be the answer to that question. Emily Thornberry has perhaps been the most obvious candidate to take over from Jeremy Corbyn, particularly when dressed as an EU flag, but she’s got competition. Last night at a fringe meeting organised by Politico, shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer also made a rather obvious pitch of his own.
We were given a backstory (father worked in a factory, mother was a nurse until illness forced her to stop work, and the family lived not in posh Labour north London but the badlands of, er, the Surrey/Kent border), a wide-ranging view from Starmer on policy and the party, and his commitment to everything public (no private schooling, no private health etc).
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