Keir Starmer’s hardest task lies ahead

Keir Starmer’s first conference speech as Labour leader took place in exceptional circumstances. Thanks to Covid, there was no party conference in the conventional sense. His speech lacked the usual enthusiastic audience primed to punctuate a leader’s rhetoric with cheers; nor was there a ten-minute-long standing ovation at its conclusion. It was a desperately low-key event.

If the lack of conventional theatrics made the speech unique, Starmer’s address was in terms of substance exactly what we might expect from the leader of a party which has suffered four successive defeats, especially as the last one was Labour’s worst since 1935. For Starmer’s main theme was – other than criticism of the government’s handling of the Covid crisis – that Labour had changed. His podium even carried the legend ‘A New Leadership’ to indicate in as clear terms as possible that the party was, as he put it in one Prime Minister’s Questions, under ‘new management’.