Starmer’s ‘why Labour’ message needs to get slicker

Keir Starmer has been considerably less discombobulated by the election announcement than the party that made it, but he still has some catching up to do. The Labour leader knows that he has to answer the question of ‘why Labour’ to voters who have already largely accepted that there is a strong reason to change from the Tories. To that end, his speech this morning was an attempt to explain to the public what Labour now stands for.

Slightly improbably, Starmer started by telling the audience that they really should visit Oxted. The reason for this was that Starmer sees Oxted as being the way he can explain his politics and what he stands for. He was starting with his biography (again).

Anyone in the Westminster bubble could have written large sections of the speech for him because they’d heard many of the sentences before. In fact, before this election, Starmer would have been making jokes about the lines ‘my father was a toolmaker’ and ‘pebbledash semi’, but he delivered them today as though he’d never said them before — because an election campaign is when normal voters start to pay attention and hear for the first phrases we have all become used to.