Keir Starmer Is Tony Blair, Minus the Optimism

Every Briton of a certain age remembers where they were the night Tony Blair became prime minister. On the evening of May 1, 1997, drivers on the London Underground announced the exit polls to passengers. Revelers celebrated with bottles of sparkling wine on the streets. The party faithful assembled at the Southbank culture complex by the River Thames where the campaign anthem, D:Ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better,” was blared out.

Now the band, whose song was synonymous with Blair’s victory, says it doesn’t want it played this time around. Its members blame the legacy of Iraq, but it’s not just that. The song feels out of place; the overall mood is sour.

The naive mood of optimism that followed Blair into office disappeared with that war; yet the “New Labour” project proved technically resilient. Blair won his third electoral victory in 2005, only to hand over power, reluctantly, to his erstwhile friend and archrival, Gordon Brown, in 2007. Brown hung on for three years, but the project was exhausted after 13 years.

Everything is relative. It is salutary to remember that the Conservatives have lasted one year longer, from 2010 to 2024­—14 clownish, desultory, unproductive years. Five prime ministers, one Brexit nightmare, and endless corruption scandals, and yet they continue to plough on with their customary bluster.

The paradox of this moment is that Keir Starmer engenders almost none of the enthusiasm that accompanied Blair even though the present Labour leader has turned his party’s fortunes around and is on the cusp of sweeping the Tories out of power. According to opinion polls, Starmer could achieve a landslide even greater than Blair’s, consigning the Tories to the wilderness for a generation.

He has done so by promising as little as possible, focusing on six inoffensive and general pledges—such as cutting waiting times for doctors’ treatments, recruiting new teachers, and cracking down on antisocial behavior to which nobody could object. This is a direct copy from Blair in 1997, a decontamination strategy in which you give your rivals nothing to target. It has worked spectacularly well. The increasingly desperate outgoing prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has taken to warning voters not to “surrender”—alarmist talk that has invited mockery.

Starmer cruises on, repeating his mantras such as stability, responsibility, and the vague notion of change. To most voters, this will suffice—anything to kick the Conservatives out. Unlike the naive optimism of 1997, disappointment has already been factored in.

Is this a reflection of the almost complete loss of confidence by the political mainstream across the democratic world, or might this instead be later seen by historians as a masterful example of expectation management? In contrast to Blair, the showman, could the dourer Starmer achieve at least as much during his first term in office? And could he entrench Labour hegemony for at least as long a period as his predecessor did?

Starmer has brought some of Blair’s advisors of yesteryear into his core team. Others are consulted more informally. As for the man himself, Starmer noted recently: “I talk to Tony a lot about the period just before ’97, because obviously I’m very interested in talking to people who have won elections and taken a party from opposition into government.” Starmer reminded his TV interviewer caustically that Labour isn’t very good at winning—only three times since the war has it snatched power from the Tories, the other two occasions being in 1945 and 1964.

Each man’s thinking has been heavily influenced by that record. They share an assessment of Britain as a Conservative and conservative country. Labour has been the imposter. Starmer has pared back his manifesto proposals to the bare minimum—removing tax breaks on private schools to pay for the more underserved, a public energy company, and a minimal increase in workers’ rights.

Earlier, more radical ideas on the environment and on tackling child poverty were watered down. Little of any consequence is said about Brexit and the damage it has caused. The tactic is simple: Don’t rock the boat. Don’t challenge the political and economic fundamentals; instead, do what you can at the margins—if necessary, by stealth.

In the end, Blair did preside over radical improvements in public services—the fabled National Health Service (NHS), education, public transport, and social. But he rarely advertised the investments that had been made.

Perhaps a more accurate comparison would be with the first administration of Harold Wilson, one of only three previous Labour leaders to win elections since the war (the other being Clement Attlee in 1945). In his first six years in power, from 1964 to 1970, Wilson presided over a government that was technocratic but also radical.

More than his predecessors, Blair stood out most of all on the international stage. He presided triumphantly at European Union summits (even if he did little to tackle the intrinsic hostility engendered by the right-wing media). He was buddies with then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, going on to woo the likes of President Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan and Russian President Vladimir Putin to support the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 on behalf of his new friend, U.S. President George W. Bush.

Blair wrapped himself in the flag, but then it was a more optimistic union jack, the pre-millennium era of the Spice Girls and Cool Britannia. The legacy of 1989 and the collapse of communism still resonated a decade and more later. Into the early/mid-2000s, Blair-land was all about liberal democracy and free markets walking hand in hand, convincing recalcitrant autocrats of the errors of their ways. Globalization and free trade would deliver wealth. In the U.K., U.S., and across the EU, such thinking has been largely repudiated.

Two decades on, in these darker post-pandemic times, with war stalking Europe and the Middle East, with climate change targets being missed thanks to a popular backlash, with populists dominating public discourse and accreting power, Starmer ensures that the British flag accompanies every video or photograph of him. The word accompanying these pictures is “change,” but the subliminal message is “security.”

Who can blame him? Starmer has been dealt a miserable deck of cards. Unlike Blair, who was bequeathed a healthy exchequer by his Conservative predecessor, John Major—an underrated premier—the new man in 10 Downing Street inherits a moribund economy, the smallest military since Napoleonic times, an NHS on its knees, schools having to deal with leaking roofs, and post-Brexit bureaucratic obstacles that make trade infinitely harder. Thanks to Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and to a (slightly) lesser degree Theresa May and Sunak, Britain’s role is largely trashed around the world.

Starmer struggles to smile in the way Blair did. He doesn’t gladden the hearts, and he certainly isn’t promising the world. He is a man for his times, one of the few grown-up mainstream politicians still standing. With expectations so low, it will be hard for him to disappoint. Might that present him with an opportunity?