Sir Keir Starmer has insisted he can be trusted to deliver his six pledges to voters – despite abandoning many of the promises that saw him elected Labour leader.

In an interview with Sky News’ political editor Beth Rigby, Sir Keir repeatedly defended his decision to “adjust” some of the 10 pledges he made to party members when seeking to succeed Jeremy Corbyn following Labour’s disastrous 2019 general election result.

The Labour leader said: “When the facts change, the circumstances change. Good leaders know you have to adapt and change with it.”

The Labour leader was speaking following a major pre-election event in Essex, where he set out the “first steps” of a Labour government before the public heads to the polls.

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The six targets, which have been compared to the pledge card Sir Tony Blair put to voters before the 1997 general election, are to deliver economic stability, cut NHS waiting lists, crack down on anti-social behaviour, recruit 6,500 new teachers, launch a new border security command and set up publicly-owned Great British Energy.

Sir Keir said the programme was “going to be hard” to achieve, adding that the public could expect to see the promises materialise within two terms of a Labour government.

The promises have also been compared to the 10 pledges Sir Keir made when he was seeking to become leader – many of which have now been diluted or abandoned.

Among the promises he made in the 2020 leadership election that have since been scaled back are bringing back free tuition and nationalising key public utilities.

‘Junked pretty much every pledge’

Asked whether he was “trustworthy” given he had “junked pretty much every pledge you were elected Labour leader on”, Sir Keir replied: “You’ll know that for each of the 10 pledges, there’s about two or three sitting under them.

“That’s about 30 commitments, of which a few have been adjusted. The vast majority are in place, but I accept that some of them have been adjusted.”

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He drew comparisons with Liz Truss – who survived just 44 days as prime minister after her economic strategy unravelled – saying: “I think the public might be less trusting than you suggest of someone who says, ‘well, I said I’d do this, the economy has now been damaged, but I’m going to do it anyway, even though we can’t afford it’.

“I honestly don’t think that builds trust and confidence because the public know the circumstances have changed.”

‘No clear, measurable targets’

While the pledges have been seen as an expansion of the five “missions” Sir Keir laid out last year, he nevertheless faced questions that his new set of promises lacked the specificity of those promised by Sir Tony nearly three decades ago.

Rigby highlighted to Sir Keir how the former Labour prime minister promised to cut class sizes to 30 or under and cut NHS waiting lists by 100,000.

“When I look at yours, it’s economic stability, new border security, set up GB Energy,” she said.

“There’s no clear, measurable targets. Only one number on it, only one with the teachers. It’s vague enough so that you can’t be seen to break promises.

“It’s shifty isn’t it?”

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‘Not going to make a promise I don’t think I can deliver’

The Labour leader pointed to the fact he was promising 40,000 new appointments and to recruit 6,500 teachers and denied he was “under-promising”.

“I’m not going to make a promise before an election, which I don’t think I can deliver after the election,” he said.

“I think the public in the last 14 years had far too much of people who say before an election they’ll deliver everything, and afterwards they don’t. We have to break that pattern.

“So that means I have to be clear now and say there are some things I can do, there are some things I can’t do. I want to say that before the election so that I can level with the public.”

It’s mid-May, we have just completed the local and mayoral election races and the Prime Minister, to all intents and purposes seems to be going for an election anytime from October onwards.

And yet on a drizzly Thursday morning, I found myself on a train heading to Essex for a Labour campaign rally that I wasn’t entirely expecting.

When I got to the giant hanger venue, somewhere near Purfleet station, and walked into a hall with pledge banners, placards, Labour activists, the entire shadow cabinet and a tieless Sir Keir Starmer with his sleeves rolled up, I knew Labour – probably totally fed-up with the Prime Minister keeping them waiting (it is up to Rishi Sunak alone to decide the date of the election) – had decided to kick off their general election campaign.

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And that is what Starmer did, with a six-point “first steps” pledge card making concrete promises to voters that are either vague enough, or low ambition enough, for him to deliver.

I put it to him that he was watering down his missions for government – be it having all electricity generated by renewables by 2030 or having the fastest growing economy in the G7 by the end of the decade – for fear of failure.

He told me his “mission” promises still stand and his six-point plan is a “downpayment” on what a Labour government will do if elected in those first 100 days.

On Electoral Dysfunction this week we talk about the long election campaign launching – be it Starmer with his glitzy rally in Essex, or Rishi Sunak with his rather more drab speech in an airless office of Policy Exchange think tank in central London (to be fair that was a scene setter).

The short campaign is the period between the dissolution of Parliament and the date of the general election where we have a few weeks of pure campaign.

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Hot-footing it back from Essex to record the pod, we discuss Starmer’s pledge card launch and I get to show it to Jess for the first time. Ruth goes through it line-by-line as she talks about the possible Conservative attack lines, linking what Starmer is promising now to what he’s said in the past.

From Starmer, we swing to Sunak as Ruth talks about Sunak’s speech on Monday, in which the PM sought to spell out why the country was safer under him, in a winding journey that cut across so many policy areas – defence, health, tech, education – it was hard to find a clear thread.

Ruth is very clear – to paraphrase – the Conservative party election guru Lynton Crosby, who helped Cameron and Johnson to victory, that her party needs to “scrape the barnacles off the boat” – focus – and clean up the message in the long campaign to get ready for the short.

“You can’t fatten a pig on the way to market,” says Ruth, quoting Crosby. “You cannot, in the last week of a campaign, introduce something. You’ve got to lead it out 12 months before, six months before, two months before, one month before. Starmer, it seems, has got the memo, Sunak has not.”