In many ways, Keir Starmer’s makeover of the Labour party has been a deeply conventional project. Since the 1950s, a decade his buttoned-up style would have suited well, the majority of Labour leaders have moved the party rightwards. It’s what the mainstream media and big business usually advise these leaders to do, arguing that a less leftwing Labour is more politically and economically realistic – while not so readily acknowledging that such a party also offers less of a threat to their interests.
Labour’s rightward shifts don’t always work. Neil Kinnock, Jim Callaghan, Harold Wilson and Hugh Gaitskell all led the party to painful defeats. But on 4 July, Starmer’s orthodox approach looks likely to be vindicated, in electoral terms at least.
Amid the feelings of relief that have already been spreading for many months at the prospect of a steady Labour government replacing a reckless Tory one, it’s easy to forget quite how disorienting for many Labour politicians, activists and supporters Starmer’s leadership has actually been. In four years, a lawyer turned MP with limited political skills, working with previously little-known party fixers, has nearly erased his predecessor as leader, abandoned many of his initial pledges and ensured that almost all Labour candidates are loyal to his new regime. Tony Blair’s reshaping of the party in the 1990s, which left room in the cabinet for independent-minded radicals such as Robin Cook, looks almost gentle by comparison.
If you’re desperate for a Labour government and not too squeamish about how that happens, it’s not difficult to approve of the Starmer project in the abstract. But how does the party’s transformation feel for Labour people – whether Starmer enthusiasts or doubters – on the ground?
The clifftop terraces, suburbs and villages of the turbulent Labour-held constituency of Brighton Kemptown and Peacehaven are good places to find out. Until three and a half weeks ago, the party’s candidate was expected to be Lloyd Russell-Moyle, who won the often marginal seat from the Tories in 2017 with Labour’s highest ever local majority. A sometimes intemperate young leftwinger, Russell-Moyle was “not universally popular” as an MP, a Brighton Labour member told me. Yet across the sprawling constituency, from Tory-inclined, suburban Peacehaven to strongly left-leaning, urban Kemptown, “he worked very hard”. In 2019, despite Labour’s general election defeat, his majority barely dipped.
After this year’s election was called, he and the energetic local party spent a week campaigning as usual. Then his candidacy was suddenly blocked by the Labour hierarchy, on the grounds that a complaint had been made against him. No details about the complaint were released, except that it concerned behaviour from eight years ago, before he became an MP. He called the complaint “vexatious and politically motivated”, yet within two days, before its validity or otherwise could be established, Labour had chosen an alternative candidate: Chris Ward, who just so happened to have worked from 2015 to 2021 as an aide, speechwriter and deputy chief of staff for Starmer.
Last week Ward suggested he was too busy to meet me in the constituency. But I ran into him anyway, talking to a handful of volunteers at a hastily established campaign office on Kemptown’s prosperous main shopping street. Dressed in an immaculately ironed shirt and trousers but without a tie, he looked like a candidate from the New Labour era, and he spoke with Blairite smoothness, mixing upbeat campaign talk with just enough candour. I asked him what it was like to replace Russell-Moyle. “It’s not an ideal situation,” Ward said. “It’s not been an easy first week. But when I talk to people here about my local connections” – he grew up in Brighton – “the unease dissipates … I’m building bridges.”
In fact, his campaign launch a few days earlier had to be abandoned, after protesters interrupted the speeches to complain that he had been “parachuted in”, was “very much on the right of the party”, and did not realise “the depth of unhappiness” that Russell-Moyle’s removal had caused. “We’re all still angry,” one local Labour member told me. “But there’s a three-way split – those who won’t canvass for Ward, those who won’t even vote for him, and those who are angry but will go and help, because they don’t want to put the seat at risk.”
On a walk and bus journey across the whole constituency, past grand, peeling villas and immaculate small bungalows, I saw only two Labour placards outside people’s homes. More prominent was a window display at Russell-Moyle’s old constituency office, down one of Kemptown’s scruffier sidestreets, which was made up of posters with radical, now disowned Corbyn-era slogans, such as: “For the many not the few”.
As I was looking at them, a man in early middle age, laden with shopping bags, came up to me. He said he was a lifelong Labour voter who had moved back in with his parents to save money – Brighton has one of the worst shortages of affordable housing in the country. He still spoke about Russell-Moyle as his MP in the present tense.
“I know people who will sit on their hands, or vote Green,” he continued. But then he changed tack: “People thinking of not voting Labour here need to realise that if they don’t, the Tories will get back in. This Chris Ward, he’s rightwing. But as a party, you’ve got to be in power.”
Local activists say the numbers canvassing for Labour in the seat are gradually recovering. Given the general collapse in Tory support, a Labour victory here, perhaps with a reduced majority, seems the likeliest outcome. Starmer’s strategists and media champions may then dismiss the row over Russell-Moyle, like those over other deselected leftwing candidates, as of no lasting significance, like a passing shower on the Brighton seafront.
But over the longer term, the consequences of the controversy may act more like the city’s sea mists, corroding Labour’s supremacy. In April, a YouGov poll found that since 2019, the party had already lost support in 50 seats, most with large leftwing minorities. When the Conservatives recover, that decline may become electorally decisive.
Yet for now such scenarios seem far away. Outside Ward’s campaign office, I spoke to a veteran Labour activist about the whole candidacy episode. “We’ll just park it all until after 4 July,” she said, smiling knowingly in the sunshine. Millions of others with reservations about Starmer are likely to do the same.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
