The unfortunate question Sir Keir Starmer must confront as he prepares for a crucial party conference
Will Britain elect a prime minister people see as weak? This unfortunate question is one Sir Keir Starmer must confront on the eve of his first in-person party conference as Labour leader, however personally painful he finds it.
Can he reverse voters’ first impressions of him by taking on his party in Brighton then imprinting on the nation a vision of a better more prosperous Britain under Labour this week?
Or can other qualities of the Labour leader and his party ensure he is still electable?
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Labour leader attempts conference reset
What seems in little doubt is that is what the public currently think.
Exclusive polling for Sky News by Opinium makes stark reading.
By a two to one margin the public believe Sir Keir is a weak leader, according to polling conducted on Monday to Wednesday of this week, with 47% saying he is weak and 21% saying he is strong. The rest do not know.
Perhaps even more extraordinarily, the poll suggests existing Labour voters are evenly split over Sir Keir’s strength – 39% think he is strong but 37% think weak.
Pollsters believe that being seen as “weak” by the public ultimately scuppered Theresa May and Gordon Brown, so Sir Keir would be unwise to ignore the finding. But who he should fight, and how, remain big unknowns.
Many Labour MPs are crying out for Sir Keir to show spark and verve when he addresses the faithful on Wednesday.
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After all, he is up against Boris Johnson, who revels in rejecting the qualities Sir Keir espouses, and appears to profit politically from doing so.
The PM is currently successfully dealing with a competent, safe, managerial and cautious opponent with his wild proclamations, fights with the French in Franglais, a speak-first-check-later approach to the facts, a disdain for the law, conventions, courts, judges and elite opinion and an enthusiasm to be on TV bizarrely unmatched by anyone in the Labour Party.
That these qualities prove a vote winner for Mr Johnson have surprised many in Labour and Sir Keir may just be wondering whether anyone will “donnez moi un break”, but this is the reality Labour must deal with.
The Opinium poll also suggests the wider public want inspiration. 39% of voters say he is boring, while just 18% call Sir Keir interesting.
Labour voters are more likely to see him as boring, with 32% who currently vote for his party saying so, against 31% who say he is interesting.
“The public had a good first impression of Starmer, with more saying they had a positive view of him than any opposition leader since Tony Blair last summer,” explains pollster Chris Curtis from Opinium.
“But over the last 12-14 months his popularity has dropped substantially. While voters still see him as someone who is competent and cares about people’s concerns, he is not currently viewed as strong enough to be Britain’s prime minister.”
Sir Keir has a clear two-pronged plan to upend his reputation this week in Brighton, and the leader’s allies talk of him wanting to “turn the page”.
The first prong is to change some internal party rules on the Saturday and Sunday, the second is to flesh out his vision for the country between Monday and Wednesday, culminating in the speech he will make to conclude the conference.
But the rule changes have already run into trouble, and it is not clear whether Sir Keir will have the strength to push them through in the next 36 hours.
His flagship move is to scrap the way future Labour leaders are chosen, abandoning the One Member One Vote system introduced by Ed Miliband which elected Jeremy Corbyn and Sir Keir, and return to the electoral college system used previously.
Neither would have stopped Mr Corbyn’s 2015 election, yet the initiative appears designed to pick a deliberate fight with the Corbyn-supporting left.
It is not entirely clear why, however, there appears to have been a cooler than expected reaction from the unions like Unite, with it unclear whether more pro-Starmer unions like GMB will win the day.
The biggest issue, however, as the row sucks energy and oxygen out of the start of conference, is what it reveals about Sir Keir’s priorities.
Why change the rules governing the selection of his successor at all?
The Labour leadership have done a poor job explaining why this is necessary, with Sir Keir largely avoiding the media this week and Shabana Mahmood, the party’s campaign coordinator, telling me only that it was part of a “wider package of measures” but declining to go into detail why this specific change is so important.
Into this vacuum, the left is coming up with excitable conspiracy theories whether or not some around Sir Keir might try to engineer a vacancy – highly unlikely but nevertheless unhelpful speculation.
Then there is the question of whether Sir Keir can manage to speak to the country, through senior members of his frontbench team on Monday and Tuesday and his own speech on Wednesday.
The first draft of his vision came out on Wednesday night in the 11,500 word Fabian pamphlet about his vision of a contributory society.
Based on reflections from his travel around the country this summer, it suggests he sees a need for more workers’ rights, tougher laws to tackle violence against women and a strong hint that Labour would reintroduce a class size cap.
Presented as a document designed to burnish Sir Keir’s centre ground credentials, it stresses the need for partnership with the private sector and even nods to the legitimate causes of Brexit.
But this needs to be translated into a vision that captivates.
Although hard, it can be done like David Cameron’s speech as Leader of the Opposition in 2006 or Ed Miliband’s Predators v Producers speech of 2011, who were both leaders on the back foot at the time their speeches turned their fortunes around.
The scale of Sir Keir’s challenge can be seen in the hardest to measure metric of all: the silence of people who should be allies.
The Labour leader’s office committed an act of self harm this week, in the face of the energy crisis and run-up to Labour conference, not even able to field frontbench supporters to go on TV and radio to cheer for Sir Keir and his rule changes and attack the government.
Instead it was left to Gordon Brown and John McDonnell to fill the airwaves.
Asked by Kay Burley on Sky News why the absence, Party chairwoman Anneliese Dodds suggested: “I’m sure it was more to do with some kind of logistical issues rather than anything more serious than that.”
Asked in private this week what they make of the operation and preparations for the conference, many have said they don’t disagree but the handling of the last few days felt so chaotic they want to avoid intervening.
“I’m not sure what he’s passionate about,” says one Labour MP who should on paper be one of Sir Keir’s strongest allies.
“I think the rule change is the right thing to do I’m just not going out to bat for it when they’ve cocked up the execution so badly.”
MPs like the former party chairman Ian Lavery are now openly giving odds on Sir Keir being gone by Christmas, giving a one in five chance of this outcome.
If he wants to persuade voters he is indeed a strong leader, Sir Keir needs his allies cheering him on and making that case.
One of Kemi Badenoch’s top team has admitted there were flaws in the plan to return illegal migrants after Brexit, Sky News can reveal.
Boris Johnson repeatedly told the public that Brexit would mean taking back control of Britain’s borders and migration system.
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But in a leaked recording obtained by Sky News, Chris Philp, now shadow home secretary, said Britain’s exit from the EU – and end of UK participation in the Dublin agreement which governs EU-wide asylum claims – meant they realised they “can’t any longer rely on sending people back to the place where they first claimed asylum”.
Mr Philp appeared to suggest the scale of the problem surprised those in the Johnson government.
Chris Philp is the shadow home secretary. Pic: Reuters
“When we did check it out… (we) found that about half the people crossing the Channel had claimed asylum previously elsewhere in Europe.”
In response tonight, the Tories insisted that Mr Philp was not saying the Tories did not have a plan for how to handle asylum seekers post Brexit.
Mr Philp’s comments from last month are a very different tone to 2020 when as immigration minister he seemed to be suggesting EU membership and the Dublin rules hampered asylum removals.
In August that year, he said: “The Dublin regulations do have a number of constraints in them, which makes returning people who should be returned a little bit harder than we would like. Of course, come the 1st of January, we’ll be outside of those Dublin regulations and the United Kingdom can take a fresh approach.”
Mr Philp was also immigration minister in Mr Johnson’s government so would have been following the debate closely.
Philp was previously a close ally of Liz Truss. Pic: PA
In public, members of the Johnson administration were claiming this would not be an issue since asylum claims would be “inadmissible”, but gave no details on how they would actually deal with people physically arriving in the country.
A Home Office source told journalists once the UK is “no longer bound by Dublin after the transition”, then “we will be able to negotiate our own bilateral returns agreement from the end of this year”.
This did not happen immediately.
In the summer of 2020, Mr Johnson’s spokesman criticised the “inflexible and rigid” Dublin regulations, suggesting the exit from this agreement would be a welcome post-Brexit freedom. Mr Philp’s comments suggest a different view in private.
The remarks were made in a Zoom call, part of a regular series with all the shadow cabinet on 28 April, just before the local election.
Mr Philp was asked by a member why countries like France continued to allow migrants to come to the UK.
He replied: “The migrants should claim asylum in the first safe place and that under European Union regulations, which is called the Dublin 3 regulation, the first country where they are playing asylum is the one that should process their application.
“Now, because we’re out of the European Union now, we are out of the Dublin 3 regulations, and so we can’t any longer rely on sending people back to the place where they first claimed asylum. When we did check it out, just before we exited the EU transitional arrangements on December the 31st, 2020, we did run some checks and found that about half the people crossing the channel had claimed asylum previously elsewhere in Europe.
“In Germany, France, Italy, Spain, somewhere like that, and therefore could have been returned. But now we’re out of Dublin, we can’t do that, and that’s why we need to have somewhere like Rwanda that we can send these people to as a deterrent.”
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Mr Johnson announced the Rwanda plan in April 2022 – which Mr Philp casts as the successor plan – 16 months after Britain left the legal and regulatory regime of the EU, but the plan was blocked by the European Court of Human Rights.
Successive Tory prime ministers failed to get any mandatory removals to Rwanda, and Sir Keir Starmer cancelled the programme on entering Downing Street last year, leaving the issue of asylum seekers from France unresolved.
Speaking on Sky News last weekend, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said there has been a 20% increase in migrant returns since Labour came to power, along with a 40% increase in illegal working raids and a 40% increase in arrests for illegal working.
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Britain’s membership of the EU did not stop all asylum arrivals. Under the EU’s Dublin regulation, under which people should be processed for asylum in the country at which they first entered the bloc.
However, many EU countries where people first arrive, such as Italy, do not apply the Dublin rules.
The UK is not going to be able to participate again in the Dublin agreement since that is only open to full members of the EU.
Ministers have confirmed the Labour government is discussing a returns agreement with the French that would involve both countries exchanging people seeking asylum.
Asked on Sky News about how returns might work in future, the transport minister Lilian Greenwood said on Wednesday there were “discussions ongoing with the French government”, but did not say what a future deal could look like.
She told Sky News: “It’s not a short-term issue. This is going to take really hard work to tackle those organised gangs that are preying on people, putting their lives in danger as they try to cross the Channel to the UK.
“Of course, that’s going to involve conversations with our counterparts on the European continent.”
Pressed on the returns agreement, Ms Greenwood said: “I can confirm that there are discussions ongoing with the French government about how we stop this appalling and dangerous trade in people that’s happening across the English Channel.”
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A Conservative Party spokesman said: “The Conservative Party delivered on the democratic will of this country, and left the European Union.
“The last government did have a plan and no one – including Chris – has ever suggested otherwise.
“We created new deals with France to intercept migrants, signed returns agreements with many countries across Europe, including a landmark agreement with Albania that led to small boat crossings falling by a third in 2023, and developed the Rwanda deterrent – a deterrent that Labour scrapped, leading to 2025 so far being the worst year ever for illegal channel crossings.
“However, Kemi Badenoch and Chris Philp have been clear that the Conservatives must do a lot more to tackle illegal migration.
“It is why, under new leadership, we are developing g new policies that will put an end to this problem – including disapplying the Human Rights Act from immigration matters, establishing a removals deterrent and deporting all foreign criminals.”
Proposals have been drawn up to spend millions in deprived neighbourhoods which are most at risk of failing to meet the government’s missions, Sky News understands.
Approving the money will ultimately be a decision for the Treasury in the upcoming spending review, but it has wide support among backbench MPs who have urged the government to do for towns “what Blair and Brown did for cities” and regenerate them.
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Labour MPs told Sky News austerity is the main driver of voters turning to Reform UK and investment is “absolutely critical”.
The plan is based on the findings of the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods (ICON), which identified 613 “mission-critical” areas that most need progress on Sir Keir Starmer’s “five missions”: the economy, crime, the NHS, clean energy and education.
The list of neighbourhoods has not been published but are largely concentrated around northern cities such as Manchester, Liverpool, Sunderland and Newcastle, a report said.
Some of the most acute need is in coastal towns such as Blackpool, Clacton, and Great Yarmouth, while pockets of high deprivation have been identified in the Midlands and the south.
Clacton is the seat of Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who is hoping to be Sir Keir’s main challenger at the next general election following a meteoric rise in the polls.
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However, Labour MP for Blackpool South Chris Webb said this wasn’t about Reform – but investing in places that have been forgotten.
He told Sky News: “Coastal towns like my hometown of Blackpool have been overlooked by successive governments for too long, and it’s time to change that narrative.
“The findings of the ICON report are a wake-up call, highlighting the urgent need for investment in our communities to address the alarming levels of crime, antisocial behaviour, poverty, and the stark disparities in life expectancy.”
He said he’d be lobbying for at least £1m in funding. His residents are “understandably frustrated and angry” and “deserve better”.
Chris Webb. Pic: Peter Byrne/PA
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The spending review, which sets all departments’ budgets for future years, will happen on 11 June. It will be Rachel Reeves’ first as chancellor and the first by a Labour government in over a decade.
Southport MP Patrick Hurley told Sky News the last Labour government “massively invested in our big cities” after the dereliction of the 1980s, “but what Blair and Brown did for our cities, it’s now on the new government to do for our towns”.
He added: “Investment in our places to restore pride, and improve the look and feel of where people live, is essential.”
Another Labour backbencher in support of the report, Jake Richards, said seats like his Rother Valley constituency had been “battered by deindustrialisation and austerity”.
“Governments of different colours have not done enough, and now social and economic decay is driving voters to Farage,” he said.
“We need a major investment programme in deprived neighbourhoods to get tough on the causes of Reform.”
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ICON is chaired by former Labour minister Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top.
The report said focusing on neighbourhoods is the most efficient route to mission delivery and is likely to have more support among voters “than grandiose national visions of transformation” – pointing to the Tories’ “failed levelling up agenda”.
The last major neighbourhood policy initiative was New Labour’s “New Deal for Communities”, which funded the regeneration of 39 of England’s poorest areas.
Research suggests it narrowed inequalities on its targeted outcomes and had a cost-ratio benefit. It was scrapped by the coalition government.
Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Secretary Angela Rayner has already announced £1.5bn “Plan for Neighbourhoods” to invest in 75 areas over the next decade, with up to £20m available for each.
A government source told Sky News expanding the programme “would be a decision for the upcoming spending review”.
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