How Keir Starmer turned the Labour party into a winning force in five years
When Keir Starmer was first elected as party leader, one senior Conservative adviser warned Boris Johnson that this new opposition figure would almost certainly be "underestimated".
They listened to Tory MPs almost celebrate the decision, convinced that voters would lack enthusiasm for this "boring" choice.
But the adviser was sure his colleagues were wrong, arguing that Starmer was presentable, non-threatening and would almost certainly be seen as acceptable to what he described as "Tory persuasion voters".
Still, after Labour's hammering in the 2019 General Election, no one expected Starmer to be walking into Downing Street as prime minister today, just five years on.
So how did he get there?
Was Starmer simply carried over the threshold on the winds of Conservative decline, triggered by scandals and chaos from Partygate to the mini-budget and beyond?
Or was this Starmer's victory, carefully carved out from his role as leader and that of his chief strategist, Morgan McSweeney?
For months, I've been thinking about these questions as I scrutinised Starmer's operation, going behind the scenes with the man himself, but also speaking to dozens of people who work closely with him.
As well as the day job, this work has been contributing to a book I am writing on how this election was won and lost.
What I have found is a man as likely to be called "deeply caring" by his staff and friends as "utterly ruthless"; a politician with sharp and relentless determination; a leader willing to take any decision if convinced it would hand his Labour party a strategic advantage.
In McSweeney, Starmer found an impressive political operative who was just as obsessed as he was about winning.
In the answer to the questions above both factors have been absolutely critical.
While it is unquestionably true that the Tories created many of the problems that brought them to their worst result since 1832, it is also true that Starmer has massively shifted Labour.
A good example of both sides of this coin came in September 2022, at the Labour party conference.
Just two days after Kwasi Kwarteng delivered his mini-budget, and on the very day that the then-chancellor declared there was "more to come", Starmer was pacing backstage at the ACC conference centre in Liverpool.
Kwarteng's words would cause huge instability in the financial markets and have a long-lasting impact on Starmer's fortunes, but in that moment, the Labour leader wasn't thinking about the weeks, months and years ahead - his mind was on a single minute.
Starmer believed that if his party could lead a 60-second, silent tribute to the Queen (who had recently passed away) uninterrupted, it would represent a changed Labour party, which was more voter-focused and patriotic than ever before.
While this act may seem uncontroversial to most of us, to almost everyone I speak to in the Labour leader's inner team it was a huge risk, not least because of the heckling that had taken place during Starmer's conference speech a year earlier.
Some point to that as an example of something that challenges Starmer's reputation as risk averse.
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They also point to the changes he has made within the party, including calling the former general secretary Jennie Formby on day one of his leadership and asking her to resign.
"There is no precedent for sacking the general secretary on your first day as leader," an ally of Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, told me.
To Starmer's critics, that was the first act of a factional purge, that resulted in him reshaping the party in his image.
To his supporters, it was a critical move that started the process of taking control of the key levers of control within Labour, moving onto the national executive committee, next.
In 2021, he forced through rule changes to prevent another Corbynite challenging for the leadership in the future despite being told that the predicted margin of victory could be as small as one vote.
On policy, the shift has been clear - towards the centre and what the party believes will win back key working class voters in marginal seats.
For example, Starmer was quick to drop his support for a people's vote on Brexit after the 2019 election and his victory in the leadership campaign.
Getting the party to back Boris Johnson's Brexit vote (against the advice of former Labour prime ministers, I'm told) was seen as absolutely critical (and a job done impressively by Rachel Reeves in her first shadow cabinet role under Starmer).
The other shifts were towards economic competence, with new fiscal rules, and a tougher position on patriotism.
What we've seen tonight is an incredibly "efficient" result for Labour, which has allowed Starmer to win a big majority off a likely lower overall share than Jeremy Corbyn achieved in 2017 (when he lost).
It was always part of McSweeney's strategy to shift the focus to the working class, Leave-voting populations in marginal seats in order to boost the chance of a majority. But the cost of that can also be seen this morning.
Labour's vote share is down in its safest seats (with plenty of Labour MPs moaning to me about being unable to work their seats in this campaign) and the issue with Muslim voters is a serious one. I've written before that the loss of trust among Muslim voters has been painful for Labour, and it is not just about Starmer's early position on Gaza.
This is something like a second Red Wall, in my view. Another group of voters who have backed Labour unquestionably for years and who are now unsure that it is benefiting them. Labour knows this loss of trust long pre-dates Gaza and is not only about foreign policy.
When I spoke to voters in Birmingham (where Jess Phillips has just hung on in a previously safe seat today) they were as likely to raise the question of the two child benefit cap as Gaza.
But today that won't stop Starmer.
The atmosphere in the hall for that 2022 minute's silence was tense. One person called it "the longest minute of my life". Many in Starmer's team saw that day as a key turning point, and all of them were present under what some described as a "three line whip" to be in the hall.
As well as Starmer, Reeves, Angela Rayner, and the rest of the shadow Cabinet, were McSweeney and a number of other key figures including a number of senior women, who rarely get as much attention as others.
Take Hollie Ridley who was described to me at the time as the "most powerful woman in the Labour party" and who just ran the entire field operation for this election; director of strategy, Deborah Mattinson; Reeves' chief of staff, Katie Martin; director of external affairs Vidhya Alakeson; media figures Steph Driver and Sophie Nazemi, and many more. Perhaps the most powerful of all now - Sue Gray - had yet to arrive then.
There are plenty of men too, of course! Like Labour's attack chief Paul Ovenden and the three Matts - Doyle, Pound, and Faulding - responsible for communications, changing the party and selections respectively.
Will Starmer govern more radically than he has campaigned? He will certainly be under pressure to do so, with an inflated Labour party, that will be hard to control even if it does draw more new members from his more centrist part of the party.
Take the 'soft-left' grouping of the so-called Tribune group, with dozens of MPs. Yes, they are fairly loyal to Starmer, but they also want him to show them Labour values. Two issues I can see dominating in terms of pressure from the backbenches are the question of wealth taxes, and that issue again - the two child benefit cap.
But the new Cabinet will have to break through Reeves' fiscal discipline. And Sue Gray has told every MP who will be sitting at Starmer's top table that they will be judged on delivery.
As for McSweeney - he has certainly delivered and from long before he entered opposition with Starmer. McSweeney's obsessive political organising stretches back years. In 2006 - he and Steve Reed the new environment secretary re-took control of Lambeth council for Labour against a tide against Labour in London by an impressive campaign of relentlessly targeting just 13,000 votes with a disciplined message.
In Barking and Dagenham in 2010 he (along with many others) helped to banish the BNP from east London in a political fight that was arguably a canary in the coalmine for the Red Wall disaffection that would follow years later.
It was polling of Labour members for the group Labour Together that led McSweeney and Reed to back Starmer for the leadership - convinced that only he could build a bridge between Labour's soft-left and centrist members who would help beat a Corbynite candidate.
Starmer's first director of policy Claire Ainsley, once told colleagues that the Labour party they had inherited was like a boat ravaged by storm damage. She argued and others argued that the party must focus on fixing that damage, because they couldn't control the political weather in the same way. In the end two things happened - Starmer fixed the boat, and then a gale of Tory failure blew in his favour.
But he inherits an incredibly difficult economic picture- that could leave him with the shortest of honeymoons.
Anushka Asthana’s upcoming book about the General Election will be published by HarperCollins in hardback, e-book and audio
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