Labour Party Leader Keir Starmer meets staff at a supermarket while on the general election campaign trail, in Wiltshire, U.K., on June 19.Stefan Rousseau/The Associated Press
Britain’s July 4 election is a contest between two politically unexciting and not very eloquent men, both of whom have spent the past few years struggling to reunite once-mighty political parties that had torn themselves apart.
Surprisingly, the one on the path to a generational majority shift is not Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives but Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. To understand how, you need to gaze deep into the radioactive cores of these parties.
I spent a lot of time in the 2000s and early 2010s at their annual conferences. In those years, the interesting stuff was to be found not in the main halls, where these blandly respectable parties offered their wares to voters, but down the street at fringe events, where you heard from factions and movements on the margins of, or even banished from, the party.
Labour’s fringe consisted of revolutionary-left groups, such as Socialist Appeal, Campaign Group and the offshoots of Militant Tendency, whose banning in the 1980s had led the party on a path to 13 years of mildly left-wing government. Most of these fringe figures were big-hearted idealists or congenital anti-establishment types (at a time when their party was very much the establishment), but I had also become accustomed, in hallway conversations, to hearing earnest defences of foreign dictatorships, past and present, and theories involving an all-controlling “them” who always seemed to be Jewish.
The Tory fringe, meanwhile, was dominated by ultra-nationalist factions who wanted to end immigration, reimpose trade barriers and leave the European Union – a reversal of Margaret Thatcher’s values. It was here you’d also hear from those shunned by the party for their racially intolerant or antisemitic views.
Two fatal decisions in the mid-2010s led these fringes to seize control.
In 2014, Labour decided to raise funds by selling hundreds of thousands of membership cards, and allowing those members to select the party leader. The revolutionary-left groups, with a history of using “entryist” tactics to take control of protest movements, did this with the entire party, engineering the installation of perpetual backbencher Jeremy Corbyn as leader.
Facing a similar risk from his far-right fringe, the Tories’ then-prime minister David Cameron chose a flanking strategy: he would hold a non-binding referendum on their cherished Brexit; its failure would consign them back to the church halls. But it somehow succeeded in 2016, leading Mr. Cameron to be turfed and replaced with a series of increasingly fringe figures devoted to an ever-harder national isolation.
Those leaders should never have become Prime Minister. As early as 2017, a majority of Britons hated the idea of Brexit, giving Labour an easy path to victory. The 2017 and 2019 elections were both triggered by the failures of Tory prime ministers to negotiate a path out of the EU. But Mr. Corbyn refused to campaign on this most central issue, suffered mass defections of more pragmatic MPs, declined to confront a growing crisis of far-left antisemitism within the party, and somehow lost the two most winnable elections his party faced this century, denying his country a progressive government when it needed one and opening the gates for fringe Tories such as arch-nationalist Boris Johnson and ultra-libertarian Liz Truss.
Mr. Sunak, entering amidst Ms. Truss’s economic wreckage in 2022, chose appeasement: He would give the far right their wildest idea – a deportation scheme of asylum seekers to Rwanda – in the hopes this would unite the party. It ended up exploding the Tories into a sea of factional shards.
Mr. Starmer, who emerged as a leader from Labour’s “soft left” in 2020, tried this tactic at first, welcoming Corbynites into his cabinet. But then, when an independent judicial review concluded the party had allowed unlawful proliferation of genuine antisemitism (and not just legitimate criticism of Israel or defence of Palestinians), Mr. Corbyn publicly claimed it was a conspiracy and an exaggeration, further damaging the party’s reputation.
So Mr. Starmer then chose, in the words of his biographer Tom Baldwin, to “move the party’s points of reference away from a narrow band of activists toward winning the support of the country as a whole.” He changed party rules so leaders and candidates would be chosen by elected MPs and the party itself, not by people who’d bought a membership card. He kicked reputation-damaging fringe MPs out of the party – including Mr. Corbyn, who is now running as an independent. He brought in figures to his right from the much-disdained Tony Blair years.
Mr. Starmer made Labour a lot less interesting and less fun and youthful, but also less prone to bigotry and much more electable. He may end up regretting his sweeping campaign of purges, but for now he has surprised everyone by avoiding Mr. Sunak’s relentless march into the woods.