The novel post-speech exercise that's full of traps for Labour
Richard Madeley got all the attention for his sexist question to Keir Starmer about Angela Rayner (“So she’s still your best girl is she?”) on Monday’s Good Morning Britain.
But the interview was also noteworthy for its discussion of the Labour leader’s party conference speech. Revisiting the themes of his address and his response to heckles from the conference floor, Keir Starmer said: ‘The slogan I used, the push down I used, was to say “chanting slogans or changing lives,” and that’s the choice the Labour Party has to make.’
Of course Labour’s political choices are not so binary. Successful political movements of left and right have naturally utilised slogans, straplines, stunts and protests alongside their programmes for change. You might even say that the absence of a strong slogan is currently a hindrance to the party’s presentation.
‘Shouting slogans or changing lives’ was on one level simply a put-down to hecklers in the room, to assert support in the conference hall. But its specific content has a further purpose: to assert a wider ‘change’ dividing line between the present leadership and Labour’s recent past – to lump all critics, not just the small number of hecklers, into the category of being unserious about winning power. Its repetition this week by Keir Starmer himself as the ‘choice the Labour Party has to make’ underlines its importance to the leadership.
One difference between this year and conferences of the past is that we are helped in our understanding of the dynamics of the Labour leader’s speech by the extraordinary spectacle of the speechwriter dissecting and spinning their own speech.
I cannot imagine a situation in which as the chief of staff for the Mayor of London, for example, I would not have dispensed with the services of anyone who wrote a keynote speech for our boss and then went out into the media to explain the nuts of bolts of what they had done.
Yet this is what has happened with Keir Starmer’s conference speech.
Jack Blanchard welcomed Philip Collins to the Politico podcast just days after the conference, describing his role in these terms: “Starmer’s speech, including his comebacks to the hecklers, had been largely written by Philip Collins, once Tony Blair’s chief speechwriter in Downing Street.” Philip Collins had also written a piece for the New Statesman offering inside-track commentary and analysis of the politics of the speech.
‘The man who wrote Keir Starmer's speech,’ said Owen Jones of the New Statesman article, ‘has reviewed the speech he himself wrote.’
The Politico interview contains some concessions to Keir Starmer – “the delivery is absolutely vital,” although we learn that “Keir doesn’t relish it as much” as Tony Blair. But largely it is about the skills and views of the writer himself.
The phones of present and former advisers to Labour politicians lit up with incredulity, messages from people of all wings of the party, most commonly variations of ‘I’ve never seen anything as unprofessional.’
Everyone knows that politicians have speechwriters - and other staff - to help them shape their message and politics. We usually know who they are. Sometimes they will be asked to provide a background steer to journalists, to give a sense of intent and the direction of travel on behalf of their boss. But for one such individual to step forward into the media, not months or years but a handful of days later, to explain their own personal involvement is pretty wild. As an exercise it has the effect of openly depriving the person delivering the speech of some of their authorship and agency. To so nakedly describe your own role in the drafting of a politician’s speech, the tricks of the trade and your own analysis raises up your role at the expense of weakening that politician. We are not talking about a reflective book a few years later but the immediate aftermath of the conference.
There is precedent for senior advisers to appear on behalf of politicians following big speeches or debates, most notably in the US. Those interventions reflect the agreed strategy of the campaign team to make the case for their boss in the spin room. But that is a world away from how this aspect of Keir Starmer’s speech has been handled.
Criticism of such a novel post-speech exercise cannot be limited to professional or process points. The analysis given takes on an official or semi-official status, and the interpretation contains plenty of relish for a factional fight that shows zero interest in reaching out and uniting the party. ‘There will be a lot of sound and fury from the left but Starmer’s speech in Brighton made them irrelevant, at least until the next election,’ Philip Collins argues. And further: ‘It is a law of Labour politics that if the left, or even the soft left, is happy, then the Labour Party is on course to lose the next election.’
But the interpretation of the speech does not merely draw left-right lines. It goes further, sending signals straight back to the leadership itself. A question is being posed: is the Labour Party willing to make the ‘necessary’ reforms? As Philip Collins puts it, ‘the strategic discussion that matters in Labour will be between those who think that Starmer has gone far enough and those who think he now needs to go a lot further.’ As one MP put it to me: ‘The Philip Collins article is part of the right ramping up the pressure on Keir Starmer.’ It gives every impression that some in the party’s structures feel they need to pressurise the leader to see how much further he is prepared to go.
Traps and danger points are everywhere with the trajectory that’s being proposed. If you genuinely believe that Labour cannot win if its left and soft left are happy then by definition you will extend conflict closer and closer to the general election. Voters will continue to see an unappealingly divided and fractious party.
And consciously defining the left and soft left as a constituency of the unhappy is a combination that is surely extremely hard to contain. In circumstances in which so many members are written off, the left is more than capable of securing a hearing amongst large numbers of the membership and the party’s affiliates, and is a very long way off from being irrelevant.