It must be terribly confusing being Keir Starmer, trying to remember what you are supposed to feel about Jeremy Corbyn in any particular moment in order to serve the point you’re making.
When running to be Labour leader in 2020, Starmer described Corbyn as “a friend”, having served for over three years in his shadow cabinet. Last week, he used the spectre of the former Labour leader to dismiss the Conservative manifesto, describing it as a “Jeremy Corbyn-style manifesto where anything you want can go in it”.
Then last night, Starmer was one of the four party leaders to be grilled in the Question Time leader’s debate. After being asked about his claim in the 2019 general election that Corbyn would have made “a great prime minister”, Starmer dithered for a bit, before saying Corbyn “would be a better prime minister” than “what we got – Boris Johnson, a man who made massive promises and didn’t keep them”.
Starmer can hardly complain that he keeps being asked about his former boss when he regularly chooses to invoke him. When Corbyn became party leader after Ed Miliband had led Labour to defeat with just 30 per cent of the vote, he didn’t mention Miliband, let alone demonise him. He got on with the job and focused on the future.
But today, Corbyn is no longer welcome in “my changed Labour Party”, as Keir Starmer calls it, even though Natalie Elphicke (who not only backed Boris Johnson, but Liz Truss too) is met with open arms. Ed Miliband, who led the party to an arguably worse defeat than Corbyn, also sits in Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet.
When Starmer won the Labour leadership, in his victory speech, he said: “I want to pay tribute to Jeremy Corbyn, who led our party through some really difficult times, who energised our movement, and who’s a friend as well as a colleague.”
The Corbyn-Starmer “friendship” is now over, and Corbyn is mobilising and energising people in his independent campaign in Islington North against a Labour candidate who has so far refused to attend hustings with the former Labour leader. Perhaps because he cannot have a clue what the official Labour line is on his opponent – friend, pariah or better PM than Johnson?
People understand that Starmer served in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet but is not on the socialist left of the party. The more Starmer criticises Corbyn, the more it raises questions about his own judgement: if Corbyn is so bad, why did you serve under him and praise him?
Starmer could invoke Labour’s broad church tradition (which Corbyn adhered to by appointing him), but unfortunately his purging of the left and top-down leadership style embeds the notion that there is uniformity, rather than plurality.
Starmer’s flip-flopping on Corbyn would normally open him up to attack from his Tory opponents, but that attack is easily repelled since Rishi Sunak backed the incompetent Johnson, and many of his Cabinet enthusiastically served under the mercifully short-lived tenure of Liz Truss.
Friend or foe? Great prime minister, better than Johnson or a disaster? It reminds me of that Meredith Brooks song from the 1990s: “I’m your hell, I’m your dream, I’m nothing in between, You know you wouldn’t want it any other way”.
Corbyn appears to be a versatile figure in Starmer’s imagination. How Gareth Southgate must yearn for a utility player like that – especially one comfortable on the left wing.
Andrew Fisher is a former executive director of policy for the Labour Party