Keir’s support for NATO is the biggest comms shift of his leadership so far

Credit: Jack Hill

James Mills, John McDonnell’s spin doctor, apparently kicked a bin across the room when he heard of Seamus Milne’s briefing on the Salisbury poisonings. In his capacity as Jeremy Corbyn’s Director of Communications, Milne had taken it upon himself to tell lobby journalists that the government should send a sample of the chemicals used to poison the Skripals to Russia for testing. The reaction that followed spread from concern to outright condemnation of the Labour leader’s apparent ambivalence to an attempted murder by a foreign adversary on home soil.

What he said next proved omniscient; “That’s f***ing going to cost us the election!”. Up until the point of the Salisbury poisonings, Labour had actually been broadly leading in the polls. Shortly after (with 53% of the public thinking the PM had done a good job, and only 18% agreeing with Corbyn), Labour’s numbers plummeted, never to return. 

The trauma of Jeremy Corbyn’s fence sitting when it came to Russia and his wider ‘anti-imperialist’ foreign policy – although I’m not sure what else we should call Russia’s behaviour right now - should be kept in mind when reading Sir Keir Starmer’s article on Labour’s “unshakable” commitment to Nato last week.

Clearly, one of the major bits of analysis from Keir’s team is that Labour are not trusted on the nation’s security and have endeavoured to win the public back on this issue. This is not a trend; ahead of his first conference speech as party leader, his team briefed that national security will be a top priority for Labour under his leadership. So far, so normal.

But politics is often the art of picking the right enemies, and what is noteworthy about Sir Keir’s article (and what set Twitter alight shortly thereafter) was his willingness on record to call out Stop the War – an organisation with a long history on the left, and which Jeremy Corbyn has a close relationship to as current Vice-President.

Keir argued that they were “virtue signallers” who are not “benign voices for peace”, and that there is “nothing progressive in showing solidarity with the aggressor when our allies need our solidarity”. This is not soft language, nor the unifying Keir Starmer that was once promised. This was a man who is clearly looking to create huge dividing lines between himself and his predecessor – to the point where he even visited Nato on the same day as the Prime Minister, billed as a ‘show of unity’. Imagine that happening three years ago.

Interestingly from a comms perspective, Keir also invoked Labour’s history, together our creation of the NHS and Nato – as well as referencing notable figures such as Clement Atlee and Denis Healey. The link is clear; this is what proper Labour is, not the stuff that came before. 

And tucked into this op-ed is a nice aside about the influence of Russian money in Britain. This is clearly a coordinated message, with Sadiq Khan making similar arguments this week. As well as hoping to make political heigh by kicking the Tories on their close relationships with Russian oligarchs, Labour will be hoping to shut off a funding stream for the Conservatives when the Labour Party is itself close to broke.

So, forget Labour being under new management, that article was one of the single communications shifts in Labour’s recent history. The reality is that on regional inequality, the size of the state, tackling the climate crisis and even on most social issues, the Labour Party now doesn’t look drastically different to what it did 4 years ago.

But on defence and national security, the party is unrecognisable to what it was under Corbyn’s leadership. Keir’s team will be hoping that far from f***ing costing them an election, it helps win them one instead.

Richard Brooks
Portland Communications