Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves launch Labour's green investment plans at the Port of Southampton on June 17, in Southampton.Carl Court/Getty Images
Keir Starmer’s political prospects couldn’t have looked much worse when he took over as leader of Britain’s Labour Party four years ago.
Labour was still reeling from the results of a general election a few months earlier, which saw the party lose to the Conservatives for the fourth straight time and its seat total sink to an 80-year low. Mr. Starmer’s bland personality paled in comparison to the flamboyance of then-Conservative leader Boris Johnson, and by the summer of 2021, some Labour insiders were grumbling that the party needed a new leader.
Now, as Britons head to the polls next week, Mr. Starmer is enjoying a remarkable turnaround.
Virtually every opinion poll points to a Labour victory on July 4 and even some Conservatives concede that Mr. Starmer will likely win a supermajority in the House of Commons.
“It’s undoubtedly a huge achievement for Keir Starmer,” said Karl Pike, a former Labour adviser and campaign worker, who is now a lecturer in public policy at Queen Mary University of London. “If they end up with a big landslide, it will be a historic moment for the Labour Party.”
There’s little doubt that much of the rebound is because of the public’s growing discontent with the Conservatives, who have been in power for 14 years and spent much of the past three years embroiled in internal wrangling.
The nadir for the Tories came in the fall of 2022, after MPs kicked out Mr. Johnson because of a series of scandals and replaced him with Liz Truss. They turned on Ms. Truss less than two months later when her mini-budget caused chaos in financial markets, with its promise of sweeping tax cuts without a corresponding funding plan.
Rishi Sunak was quickly installed as leader, but the party’s popularity with voters plummeted while support for Labour soared. And public opinion hasn’t budged much since.
But the public’s move toward Labour wasn’t just a protest vote against the Conservatives and Mr. Starmer can claim credit for making his party more acceptable to voters.
By fall 2022, he’d pulled Labour toward the centre and ruthlessly shed its far-left fringes.
He’d cast aside leftist loyalists, including his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, and jettisoned some of the party’s cherished policies, such as widespread nationalization, big increases in public spending and a wariness about nuclear deterrence and NATO.
He also courted business leaders and even recruited a group of corporate heavyweights, including former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, to advise the party on how to create a sovereign wealth fund. Mr. Carney has been so impressed that during Labour’s annual conference last year, he offered a ringing endorsement of Rachel Reeves, a former Bank of England economist and Labour’s finance critic.
Mr. Starmer launched the party’s election platform two weeks ago by describing Labour as “pro-business and pro-worker” and “the party of wealth creation.” He has promised to reduce immigration, freeze taxes on individuals and businesses, crack down on crime and fully back Ukraine in its war with Russia.
When a heckler interrupted his speech to say the platform wasn’t radical enough, Mr. Starmer shot back, “We gave up being the party of protest five years ago.” He added for good measure: “The defining purpose of my Labour leadership has been to drag my party away from the dead end of gesture politics.”
The work Mr. Starmer put in to steering the party in a different direction allowed him to seize on the “meltdown in the Conservative Party,” said Patrick Diamond, a former special adviser to the last Labour government, who is now a public policy professor at Queen Mary.
“Labour has essentially inoculated itself from the accusation of being extreme or untrustworthy. And so, people have looked at Labour and thought that it did offer the stability that the Conservatives certainly didn’t,” he added.
That’s evident in places such as Downham Market, a small town in rural eastern England that’s in the heart of Ms. Truss’s riding. The South West Norfolk constituency has been a Tory stronghold for 60 years and Ms. Truss won it by 26,000 votes in the last election, taking 69 per cent of the vote.
Opposition to her and the Conservatives is now running so strong here that several polls predicted the seat will switch to Labour.
During a recent all-candidates meeting in Downham’s Methodist Church, the anti-Conservative sentiment was palpable. Ms. Truss, who is running again, skipped the event, but every time her name came up, there was loud jeering among the 200 or so people gathered.
“She has been a cataclysmic failure both locally and nationally,” said James Bagge, a long-time local Conservative running against Ms. Truss as an independent. “So, anybody who’s Conservative will need to think twice about whether they should support her.”
Another long-time Conservative, Ian Cable, said he wasn’t sure who to vote for and he wouldn’t be surprised if Labour won the riding. “It’s a bit like the rest of the country,” he said, as he watched the meeting with his wife. “A lot of people want change, or they’re not happy about how the Conservatives have conducted themselves in the last few years.”
Amanda Poll said she’d voted Labour in South West Norfolk for years and always felt it was a wasted vote, until now. A Conservative win “is more questionable than it’s ever been,” she said. “I’m hopeful this time.”
A win in Norfolk would be the kind of breakthrough Mr. Starmer has been craving, but he still faces plenty of obstacles.
His personal popularity trails the party’s, and he is still seen by many voters as robotic and prone to flip-flopping on issues, something Mr. Sunak exploited during a feisty television debate on Wednesday.
Mr. Sunak hammered away at Mr. Starmer’s changed positions over the years and urged voters not to “surrender” to Labour.
Mr. Starmer largely kept his cool, but he has made several notable reversals over the years.
He campaigned in 2019 on a platform that included another referendum on Brexit, but he now says the issue has been settled. When he ran for the leadership in 2020, he said a Labour government would spend £28-billion annually on green projects, but he scrapped the policy earlier this year in the face of mounting questions about its financing. And last month, he dropped a promise to abolish tuition fees, saying it would cost too much.
Dr. Pike said Mr. Starmer isn’t afraid to change his mind if he believes it’s necessary. “There will be moments where he will say, ‘Okay, I did think this, but now I think that,’ and it’ll be interesting to see how that works when you’re prime minister,” he said.
Mr. Starmer and Labour also have little experience in government. Only three Labour leaders – Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair – have won elections since 1945.
Mr. Starmer spent most of his career outside politics as a lawyer, specializing in human-rights cases before running the Crown Prosecution Service for five years. He was first elected to Parliament in 2015 in a London-area riding and served as the party’s critic for Brexit under Mr. Corbyn.
Dr. Diamond said a Labour government could struggle with industrial relations and wage disputes in the public sector, which will test its close ties to unions. Doctors in England have been locked in a prolonged dispute with the Conservative government over pay, and it’s far from certain Labour would find it any easier to resolve the issue given the state of public finances
Dr. Pike said Mr. Starmer does have some experienced MPs to draw on and he will be keen to take an active role in the economy when necessary – for example, to improve workers’ rights. “The challenge is the context,” he said.
If the economy improves and some of Labour’s policies help revive growth, Mr. Starmer will enjoy a successful first term. “If the economy stays in its kind of flatlining state, then it’s really hard and the choices become really, really difficult,” said Dr. Pike.
Mr. Starmer has also tried to become more personable. During the election campaign, he has talked about the difficult relationship he had with his father, a toolmaker who died in 2018. He has also spoken of how he spent much of his childhood helping care for his mother who died in 2015 and had Still’s disease, a rare type of arthritis. And he’s noted that until he left home for university at 18, he shared a bedroom with his brother. (His parents were such loyal Labour supporters that they named him after the party’s founder Keir Hardie.)
“I think he realizes that people want to know a bit more,” Dr. Pike said. “What I would say, though, is people should pay close attention to the fact that when he has needed to be ruthless, he has been ruthless.”
If Labour does win a thumping victory next week, it could be further proof of how volatile the electorate has become, and Labour could be in the same predicament as the Conservatives in the next election.
“Once the dust settles on the victory, I think people’s thinking will shift quickly towards the question of, ‘What does happen four or five years from now if Labour doesn’t get it right in terms of delivery?’ ” Dr. Diamond said.