The party faithful were in raptures after Keir Starmer’s speech to the conference on Tuesday, but Labour mandarins will have been eyeing the reaction in unfriendly corners of the media more than they were surveying the room in Liverpool.
Media-watchers within the party ranks will have been desperately looking for any sign of a softening among the Rupert Murdoch-owned press – including the Sun and the Times – in its coverage of the speech.
Before the 1997 general election victory, Tony Blair’s aides worked tirelessly trying to secure the media mogul’s backing, with the then Labour leader controversially visiting Murdoch in Australia in 1995. Perhaps the tycoon liked backing winners, perhaps the wooing was successful, but the support finally came in March 1997, with the Sun headline: “The Sun backs Blair”.
More than 26 years later, Murdoch has stepped down as chair of Fox and News Corp and the fractured media landscape bears little resemblance to the powerful empire he once ruled. However, Labour strategists will still be hoping – and jostling – for the blessing of his son Lachlan Murdoch, who has taken the helm.
They may - just may - have seen some reason for hope. The Sun – which labelled Starmer “Sir Softy” in March – was hardly gushing in its estimation of his speech. But there was, if not approval, a cautious step towards something resembling neutrality.
The editorial criticised a lack of “hard policy”, which the newspaper found in Rishi Sunak’s address to the Tory party conference last week, but it begrudgingly admitted it could not “fault his delivery, nor his stoic handling of the protest” and said Starmer’s speech was “rousing enough if you didn’t listen too closely”.
The Sun even went as far as praising his pledge to build 1.5m new homes in five years. “Where Starmer did prevail was on housing,” said the editorial. “The Tories, shamefully, have all but given up on building the millions of homes we need. Labour at least sounds determined on that.”
Leader writers at the centre-right Times noted that Starmer sounded like a prime minister-in-waiting, even if he reassembled “an ever so slightly boring and managerial one”. But there was “nothing wrong with that after five years of political EastEnders courtesy of the Conservative party”, it added.
The Times also said Starmer had spent too little time outlining how he was going to achieve his goals. He left the impression, said the newspaper, of a “safe pair of hands who might do some good — but how much was anyone’s guess”.
The Daily Mail, which is part of the Lord Rothermere media empire, was less equivocal. Starmer’s passion gave him the air of a “fervent television evangelist”, it said, criticising the fact that the Labour leader did not mention the “small boats crisis”, tax, Brexit, striking public sector workers “or wokery”.
But even at the Mail there was recognition that Starmer had given one of his most convincing speeches to date. “While the Labour leader left the country with no reason to doubt his seriousness of vision”, the newspaper, it was “rather less clear [...] how that vision would be achieved”.
The rightwing Daily Telegraph was, however, resolutely unimpressed. While Starmer’s aides were unlikely to have expected a glowing report, its estimation that his speech was “short on detail and often vacuous in content” would have given them little to cheer about.
For that they would have to turn to the left-leaning Daily Mirror, which declared the Labour leader had “glittered on his big day, sprinkled with stardust as a protest backfired and he delivered a stunningly compelling, persuasive case for political change”.
