Keir Starmer is in the final months of an epic pursuit of his power

In the space of three days, Keir Starmer has invoked the spirit of Margaret Thatcher, taunted the Conservatives over their failure to control immigration and warned that if he takes over there will be no sudden increase in public spending.

So what? Starmer is leader of the UK’s Labour Party – and his calculated appeal to voters who defected to the Tories in 2019 confirms how serious he is about becoming prime minister. His quiet ambition and ruthless strategy have paved the way for a remarkable rise to power.

A four-month Tortoise investigation of Starmer’s single-minded purge of the left and rebranding of the party shows how 

• he began manoeuvring for the leadership more than five years ago, after Jeremy Corbyn’s bizarre response to Russia’s attempted poisoning of Sergei Skripal;
• before that he angled for a senior job in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet while others were plotting to oust him; and
• later, his leadership campaign was masterminded by an unassuming former council worker who still shuns the limelight.

Starmer karma. In March 2018 Skripal was nearly murdered with the Novichok nerve agent and Corbyn, a 30-year veteran of the hard left, said samples should be sent to Moscow. For Jenny Chapman MP, now in the House of Lords, it was “a ludicrous thing… a tipping point”. She surveyed the Labour benches, realised Labour faced crushing defeat under Corbyn and thought “the person who understood the gravity of what the country was facing was Keir Starmer”.

Chapman called him and said she’d back him for the leadership; he said he was interested. They and a close group of allies began having weekly meetings every Monday morning to discuss a plan of action. 

In parallel, a group of moderate MPs and  activists had created Labour Together – a policy shop-cum-think tank designed to keep the party together during the Corbyn years. Several MPs who are now shadow cabinet ministers were involved, including Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting, Steve Reed and Lisa Nandy. 

Quiet power.  But the driving force behind Labour Together was Morgan McSweeney, a natural political operator who still prefers to stay out of the headlines.

Previously, McSweeney had worked with Reed at Lambeth Council, helping to transform it from a failing leftwing outpost into a pioneering co-operative model. In this new role, his organisational skills were put to the test purging left wingers from the heart of the party. 

Pilot light. Labour Together raised £2 million, conducted polling and honed a strategy designed to appeal to Labour members, who they established were less leftwing than Corbyn’s two leadership wins suggested. They piloted a selection process based heavily on polling and focus groups that enabled chosen centrist candidates to outmanoeuvre those on the left. 

At this point, the two groups merged, confident Starmer could win the leadership. Internal polling suggested only one candidate could beat him: Corbyn’s shadow chancellor, John McDonnell. 

But in the wake of defeat to Boris Johnson in 2019, the left’s chosen candidate was Rebecca Long-Bailey. After a decent start, her campaign faltered. In April 2020, with campaigners and candidates confined to their homes by Covid, Starmer was named Labour leader. 

Dim star? Despite his own personal ambitions, MPs and strategists within the party weren’t convinced he had the star factor. According to many sources, Starmer was seen as a caretaker who could be relied on to turn Labour’s fortunes round after the 2019 wipeout but wasn’t viewed as true prime minister material. 

And yet: With a year at most before the next general election, Labour is consistently 20-ish points ahead of the Conservatives. 

A report out this week from JL Partners, drawing on polling data from the last 18 months, shows that

• under Rishi Sunak, the Tories are now less popular than they were even under Liz Truss; and 
• roughly 60 per cent of those who voted Conservative in 2019 are expected to desert the party at the next election.   

A high proportion of voters still “don’t know” which box they will tick, but the talk in Westminster and beyond is increasingly not what will happen if there’s a Labour government, but when.

To hear the full story, listen to Eight Years’ Hard Labour on the Tortoise app or wherever you get your podcasts.