Sir Keir Starmer launched his campaign for re-election as MP in Britain’s December 2019 snap elections on the same day the Springboks beat England in the Rugby World Cup. It was the first Saturday in November and pretty nippy in London – at least by South African standards – but neither the sports defeat nor an icy drizzle stopped Starmer and a number of Labour Party supporters from doing their door-to-door campaign in Camden Town. 

The constituency – Holborn and St Pancras – is a traditionally safe Labour-voting one. Dressed in his campaign navy blue suit and white shirt without a tie, a red paper poppy and a Labour badge on each of his lapels, Starmer had a good reception from the residents. The energetic, clean-shaven Starmer doesn’t look his 57 years. He’s held the seat since 2015.

Addressing activists in the cosy Camden Collective offices, Starmer urged that the election should not just be about Brexit. This was somewhat ironic coming from the party’s shadow secretary on Brexit, but since this was an issue that Labour Party voters were divided on, emphasising the underfunded National Health Service (NHS) was a safer campaign, if ultimately not a very successful one. In reality, the elections were almost exclusively about Brexit.

Talk of the state of the NHS was prophetic, though, in a way he couldn’t have foreseen. Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party eventually won the majority government he needed to fulfil his campaign slogan of Get Brexit Done, but barely three months later Britain’s tumultuous, drawn-out efforts to leave the European Union were shoved off the front pages by the coronavirus pandemic, which has put the country’s health services in a stark spotlight. By Saturday, the country’s confirmed Covid-19 cases approached 42,000 and there were more than 4,300 deaths. 

The pandemic forced the cancellation of the Labour Party special conference which was due to take place on 4 April. Party members, registered Labour supporters and trade unionists had to use the remote voting system after a last push of remote campaigning by candidates. Instead of being able to savour the moment from a stage in front of party members, Starmer was forced to post a video of his eight-minute-forty-one-second acceptance speech – made in what appeared to be in front of white blinds in his office or home – on his Twitter feed. 

He struck an empathetic tone as he began his speech with the pandemic. “When we get through this, it’ll be because of our NHS staff, our care workers, our ambulance drivers, our emergency services, our cleaners, our porters… For too long they’ve been taken for granted and poorly paid,” he said. 

On the BBC’s Andrew Marr show yesterday morning, he said he didn’t believe in “opposition for opposition’s sake” during the crisis, but rather in constructive engagement.

“I’m not going to score political points and I won’t demand the impossible, which is very easy to do in a time like this.”

Johnson’s government, although it was criticised for getting off to a slow start and for failing to ramp up testing, has generally had a good reception from the public in its fight against coronavirus.

Perhaps the most significant thing about Starmer’s election – he won convincingly with 56% of the votes in the first round – is that he is a clear break from his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, who resigned after Labour’s humiliating December defeat. Corbyn’s heir-designate, Rebecca Long-Bailey, garnered only 27.6% of the vote on Saturday, and Lisa Nandy 16.2%. 

Analysts pointed out that Starmer had a better start than Corbyn, because twice as many party members voted for Starmer than did for Corbyn in 2015.

“That’s a hell of a grassroots mandate,” Paul Waugh, HuffPost UK executive editor for politics, tweeted on Saturday.

Starmer is considered to be “soft left”, more of a centrist than Corbyn, under whose leadership Labour was beset by factionalism and purges.

Starmer’s apology to Jewish communities in his acceptance speech is viewed as part of his effort to make a clean break with Corbyn, whose allies in the party were accused of anti-Semitism after comments they made about Israel as well as questioning the severity of the Holocaust. 

“Anti-Semitism has been a stain on our party. I have seen the grief that it’s brought to so many Jewish communities. On behalf of the Labour Party, I am sorry,” Starmer said. 

His fans like to point to what was perhaps the biggest feat of his life before politics – the 20-year McLibel lawsuit in which Starmer, a human rights lawyer at the time, gave pro bono advice to two anarchists sued by the fast-food giant for handing out defamatory pamphlets in front of one of its London restaurants. Nobody, least of all Starmer, imagined it would go on that long. It was a “David and Goliath” case, in his words, in which McDonald’s employed top-notch lawyers, but which it lost anyway.

Starmer was appointed director of public prosecutions in 2008 and some of his decisions during this time seemingly contradicted his human rights past and could give detractors ammunition against him in future. In 2009 he refused to prosecute police officers accused of killing a newspaper vendor during a protest. He was strongly criticised by the left at a time when a number of deaths in police custody happened without subsequent prosecutions.

Starmer left office in 2013 and went back to private practice until he was selected by Labour to be its parliamentary candidate for the Holborn and St Pancras constituency after Frank Dobson’s retirement.

As the Labour Party spokesperson on Brexit, Starmer pushed for Brexit plans to be made public, which then prime minister Theresa May did in December 2016, and he wanted a second referendum on the particulars of Brexit, which became one of the Labour Party’s campaign points in the December elections. He also said free movement had to go, but free movement of labour had to be retained, given its importance for the UK’s economy.

Starmer, described by the New Statesman magazine as “the sensible radical”, promised supporters that he could break the party’s bad election performance cycle.

One of his most immediate tasks is to sort out the infighting in the party. But first, he will be meeting Johnson, recently recovered from Covid-19, to talk about dealing with the all-consuming crisis of the moment. DM