As we sat down to begin our annual conference interview shortly after the prime minister had delivered his speech to party members, I asked Sir Keir Starmer how he was feeling? “Good,” he said, “it was a speech I needed to give”.
He was right to feel buoyed. After 15 months of being battered about in government, with ever-worsening polls, open challenges to his leadership and endless private grumbling from within his own government, the PM answered his critics in a speech that showed both his emotion and intent as he pitted his vision of Britain against that of Nigel Farage.
It was a dividing line that united his party behind him as he set up the battle at the next election between Labour and Reform, between, in his words, “decency or division, renewal or decline”.
He also marched directly into societal wars with a rallying cry that was met with rapturous applause in the hall as he savaged racists who graffitied a Chinese takeaway and criticised people seeking to sow “fear and discord across our country”.
This was a PM that found his voice and identified his enemy in Farage as he sharpened his attacks and asked the public to pick a side.
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PM on Reform: ‘I think the policy is racist’
In our interview, he continued the argument, describing Farage’s plan to deport people who currently have indefinite leave to remain in the UK as “racist”.
“I think that’s a very dangerous place for us to go as a country, and it goes against everything that I believe in,” he told me.
But Starmer was keen to play the ball, not the man, as he told me he didn’t think Farage was a racist and stressed that he didn’t think Reform voters were racist either.
“They’re concerned about things like our borders,” he said.
“They’re frustrated about the pace of change. So I’m not for a moment suggesting that they are racist.”
His careful delineation reflects some nervousness at the top of his party that his attacks on Farage’s racist immigration policy is risky if those millions of Britons thinking of voting for Reform feel they are being judged as racist themselves.
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Starmer ‘responsible’ if anything happens to Farage, Reform say
PM’s speech a successful moment – but it ignored a big issue
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Farage hits back at Starmer
One cabinet minister, acknowledging the risk, said they thought it was “net positive” because it gives the party a purpose and an argument to take the fight to Reform, not around competence – Labour have hardly proved themselves on that front yet – but around values.
But this is where the prime minister also got a bit stuck in our sit-down.
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Happily calling out Farage’s plan to deport people with indefinite leave to remain if they hit stringent income and language requirements, as a racist policy, he wouldn’t tackle Donald Trump over his overtly racist attack on Sir Sadiq Khan when he suggested the London mayor, who is a Muslim, was driving London to Sharia law.
He called it nonsense, but when pressed about whether it was racist – which Khan has explicitly said it is – the prime minister told me he was “not going to start down the road of discussing whether things said by others are racist or not” – having moments earlier overtly criticised Farage for having a “racist policy”.
When I pointed this out to him, he didn’t really have anywhere left to go in what was an awkward exchange.
That he wouldn’t call out Trump speaks to the bigger challenge he faces than taking on Farage – delivering the “renewal” he says Britain so badly needs.
Sadiq Khan said Trump’s claim he is trying to impose Sharia law on London is racist
What Starmer did powerfully in one of the strongest speeches I’ve ever seen him deliver was offer clear analysis of the journey that brought Britain to the place it is now, and the alternative directions the country could go next.
But what is far, far harder than the diagnosis is the treatment. He won’t call out Trump because he needs the US president to go easy on tariffs, to work with Europe on Ukraine, to support the recently announced tech partnership, which Number 10 said could deliver £150bn of investment into the UK economy in the coming decade.
He might feel unable to criticise Trump, but the PM is borrowing the battle lines from the US, mirroring here what Joe Biden tried to do in the US ahead of the 2022 mid-term elections.
The then US president delivered a speech called the “battle for the soul of the nation” as he cast Trump and his allies as a threat to the country and to democracy, and the Democrats as the defenders of America’s core values.
Of course, it turned out that President Biden wasn’t the man to take on Trump, and paved the way to his victory by leaving it too late for another leader to take up the fight. Starmer’s team feels more confident after this week that the PM has seen off similar fears around him – for the time being at least.
But the fundamentals are still so difficult, with a challenging budget ahead and then a crucial set of elections in England, Scotland and Wales next May which could prove – to quote one Starmer detractor – “a massive moment of change”.
For now, a PM and a party pointing towards a common enemy, but Starmer’s battle is only just beginning. And, as for the journey, it’s a very, very long road ahead.
