How Keir Starmer has changed his strategy to combat Reform UK

After the disastrous end to his first year in power, the football-loving PM starts his second 0-2 down. But he won’t get back in the game by pretending to be someone he is not, writes Andrew Grice

In the battle for “Keir’s ear” before last year’s election, there was one unlikely whisperer.

Apparently, over a secret dinner, Michael Gove, then a member of Rishi Sunak’s cabinet, advised Morgan McSweeney, then Keir Starmer’s campaign director, about “overcoming vested interests and resistance to change within Whitehall”.

The story is in Tom Baldwin’s updated biography of Starmer, to be published on 31 July.

Gove reportedly found McSweeney “very open, interesting, smart and understated but also capable of expressing his opinion with clarity and force when necessary”, and believed that Starmer had made a mistake by playing the former senior civil servant Sue Gray “in the wrong position” as his chief of staff. Starmer now admits she was “not the right person for the job”.

Gove’s role will raise Conservative eyebrows. He was accused of betraying David Cameron by backing Brexit, and Boris Johnson over his 2016 Tory leadership bid. Unusually, Gove has always enjoyed a gossip with people in other parties, which shouldn’t be seen as a crime.

Today, as editor of The Spectator and a Tory peer, Gove is an admirer of McSweeney, now the Downing Street chief of staff, labelling him “the insurgent” in one cover story.

But he has been critical of Starmer on crime, education, social justice, the environment, EU relations, and for not sticking to McSweeney’s “insurgent” mantra, claiming that the Whitehall establishment has “taken back control”.

The prime minister did adopt the “insurgent” approach in February this year, telling his cabinet in a memo to be “disruptors”. But it didn’t affect Nigel Farage’s advance in the opinion polls, May’s local election results, or the Runcorn and Helsby by-election.

Starmer was always an unlikely anti-establishment hero. It wasn’t authentic, and he sometimes looked uneasy in those clothes: after he accused civil servants of being comfortable in the “tepid bath of managed decline”, he beat a hasty retreat. Similarly, he now deeply regrets unwittingly echoing Enoch Powell in a speech on immigration.

Some Starmer allies never believed that appearing to out-Farage Farage would work, and have been proved right. As one minister told me: “It jarred. It just wasn’t him. It’s better to be Mr Stability against Reform UK’s chaos.”

Starmer believes that the battle for the next general election must start now, and be between a progressive Labour Party and the right-wing populists of Reform. He will still attack Farage on policy – not least his “fantasy economics” – but will not ape Reform.

Instead, the PM will offer laborious, painstaking work to tackle the country’s problems – hence the flurry of 10-year plans, promising incremental reform rather than big bangs or silver bullets.

There might even be fewer glib three-word slogans like “smash the gangs”. Perhaps it’s better to leave those to the populists, and hope that the public comes to recognise that governing is more complicated. But will impatient voters wait for grown-up politics to work? Starmer will need to show results.

The new approach is epitomised by the returns agreement with France on migrants. The “one in, one out” deal is only one element of a much wider plan to tackle the small boats crisis. As Starmer, speaking alongside Emmanuel Macron, put it: “We have to show that pragmatic politics is the way to deliver the results which matter for both our peoples.”

What he didn’t say is equally true: that if they don’t succeed, Farage will be the beneficiary.

The change of strategy shouldn’t be seen as a defeat for McSweeney. Allies point out that he has done five different jobs for Starmer in five years at the PM’s behest, and Baldwin says he has “never been a swaggering super-adviser in the style of Dominic Cummings”.

McSweeney’s critics accuse him of being obsessed with red-wall voters and chasing Reform, conveniently forgetting that he was the architect of Labour’s remarkable 174-seat majority.

His detractors claim he is too close to the socially conservative Blue Labour group led by Maurice Glasman, who campaigned with Gove for Leave at the 2016 EU referendum. Baldwin believes Blue Labour’s influence is “probably a bit exaggerated”; McSweeney insisted to ministers that he had only met Glasman once in the previous five years.

I think Starmer’s change of tack is right. He was always an unlikely revolutionary. After being director of public prosecutions, he was never going to take a chainsaw to the system like Elon Musk.

His instincts tell him to work within institutions. He remains impatient for change. The debacle over welfare showed that he needs to make the government in general, and Downing Street in particular, work much better. The cabinet doubtless held an inquest into the shambles at its awayday at Chequers on Friday.

After the disastrous end to his first year in power, the football-loving PM starts his second 0-2 down. But he won’t get back in the game by pretending to be someone he is not.

“Be yourself” is a good motto in politics – and in life. Voters are never going to love Starmer, but he might just eventually earn a grudging respect.