Sunak’s attack on Starmer for his past support of Corbyn is weak

The average voter has bigger things to worry about than the Labour leader’s political history, writes John Rentoul

Starmer did what he had to do to survive the Corbyn era (Getty)

Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak have faced each other three times at Prime Minister’s Questions now, and each time Sunak criticised the Labour leader for having wanted to make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister.

My sources in the leader of the opposition’s office are keen to dismiss this line of attack as “tired” and ineffective. “Keir is the one who put Corbyn out of the parliamentary party,” one told me. “Everybody knows that.”

Actually, I am not sure that everybody does. But that is why I agree with Starmer’s people that it is a feeble line of attack. Most normal voters have forgotten that Starmer had anything to do with Corbyn. After all, many of them have forgotten that they themselves voted for Corbyn’s Labour Party in 2017. Admittedly, they cannot be accused of having wanted Corbyn to be prime minister, because in many cases they voted Labour only on the assumption that he wouldn’t be.

Some voters may have a stronger memory of having voted against Corbyn in 2019; by then he was extremely unpopular, and some of that damage to the Labour brand lingers, but it does not attach itself to Starmer easily. He has done a remarkable job of distancing himself from his predecessor, despite having won the leadership on a Corbynite platform just two-and-a-half years ago.

What is more, he has done it without provoking a civil war in the party. Some of Starmer’s shadow cabinet regret this, and it was reported on Saturday that they want him to go further, expelling Corbyn from the party (he is currently only suspended from membership of the parliamentary party) and selecting an official Labour candidate against him in Islington North.

These shadow ministers fear that Sunak’s attack is effective, and they want Starmer to adopt Tony Blair’s tactic of going to war with his own party as a way of advertising to the wider public that the party has changed. Normally, I would be on their side. My view is that Starmer was working against the national interest in seeking to make Corbyn prime minister (even if no one thought that was likely to happen). What is more, I haven’t forgiven Starmer for working for Tony Benn’s leadership challenge against Neil Kinnock in 1988.

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But then, even Blair and I were briefly members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the early 1980s. Most people’s views evolve. And Starmer did what he had to do to survive the Corbyn era, and to win the leadership to take the party in what the Blairites regard as the right direction.

In the end, most voters don’t pay that much attention to recent political history unless it had a direct effect on them. The arguments about Corbyn might reinforce anti-Labour views among a few swing voters, which is why Sunak will go on trying to link Starmer to his predecessor, but most voters will wonder why the prime minister is going on about something that doesn’t matter to them.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator