The Labour Party Annual Conference loves a singsong. If you don’t believe me, believe Billy Bragg, who went on the radio last week to say so and to explain why. Something to do with solidarity and community and putting your message across in words that rhyme. Football crowds are equally partial, though unlike conference delegates they adore a charismatic striker and will boo left and right wingers equally if they’re having a shocker and need hooked.

Bragg, writer of join-in-at-the-chorus ditties like New England, Between The Wars and Strange Things Happen, was on air discussing the subject of singalongs because a notable example was aired by the Labour Party faithful at the opening of their annual conference. No, it wasn’t ‘Oh, Jeremy Corybn’ to the tune of the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army. It wasn’t Angels by Robbie Williams with the words changed to ‘I’m loving Starmer instead’ (take a bow Wes Streeting, newly appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Late Night Karaoke). In fact it was the national anthem.

Not that everyone was enthused by this mark of respect for the sovereign. “Keir Starmer opened the Labour Party conference in Liverpool with a rendition of God Save The King, rather than supporting striking Liverpool dockers,” spluttered the Daily Telegraph.

Sorry, my mistake. It was the Socialist Worker, no fan of a Labour leader it views as pro-royal and pro-war.

What is true is that it’s the first time the song has appeared on the conference set list. Strange things happen, indeed. So what’s up?

Sticking with the tired conceit of dropping Billy Bragg song titles into virtually every paragraph, the national anthem was given a prominent and historic airing in large part because a new England is much on the mind of the Labour leadership. That’s ‘new’ as in ‘not run by the Conservative Party for the first time since anyone can remember’. More and more Starmer looks like a Prime Minister in waiting – a wait growing shorter with every red blink of the City traders’ screens as Captain Liz Truss and First Mate ‘Kami-Kwasi’ Kwarteng steer the SS Conservative Party onto the electoral rocks with their cockamamie trickle-down economics and car crash interviews on local radio.

Starmer has a weird sort of nominative determinism on his side too. His first name is an homage to Keir Hardie, the Scottish politician who was a co-founder of the Labour Party and also its first parliamentary leader. In that respect he’s the political equivalent of Jenson Button, the ex-Formula One driver named after the Jensen sports car – only Starmer got to keep all his namesake’s vowels, and in the right order too.

Of course Keir Hardie was already an accomplished odd jobber, errand runner and on-off rivet heater by the time he was put to work in a coal mine aged 10. Starmer, on the other hand, studied law, did a postgraduate degree at Oxford, could afford stuff like shoes and food and became a QC in 2002. For context, that was the same year his former Reigate Grammar School chum Fatboy Slim performed to a quarter of a million mashed-up ravers on Brighton beach. But none of this detracts too much from Starmer’s belief that his name is his destiny.

As an aside, but sticking with the idea of nominative determinism, do you think there has been a rash of Borises born to True Blue Brexiteers over the last couple of years, and if so should we be worried? I’ll park that here for you to muse on for the next few decades.

The Herald: GettyGetty (Image: Getty)

Anyway, back to Earth and in particular that spot of leafy North London occupied by Sir Keir Rodney Starmer as he plots a significant change to his Wikipedia entry – from Leader of His Majesty’s Opposition to Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

As well as his name and the antics of the current incumbent (or maybe because of them) the polls are certainly in his favour. Thursday’s offering from YouGov gave Labour a 33 point lead over the Tories, the largest margin since just after Tony Blair’s landslide General Election victory of 1997. Any lipreaders in your street? Play them a clip of Starmer and Blair talking together in the front row of King Charles’s Accession Ceremony. At the time I assumed the chat was, I don’t know, top ten Led Zep solos or the old Waitrose v Aldi prosecco debate or whether Erling Haaland is actually a robot. Now I’m not so sure. Was it a pep talk? Instructions? Advice? Some really juicy dirt on someone?

The personal opinion rankings also show Starmer on the up. In the same YouGov polls, voters thought he would make a better Prime Minister than Liz Truss by almost three to one. Oh, and a majority said Truss should resign and a mere 19% thought Kwarteng should remain in his role as Chancellor. Meanwhile a survey of the most popular Conservative politicians ever has Truss behind Norman Tebbit – quite an achievement, no? – and only one place ahead of multi-millionaire Old Etonian Jacob Rees-Mogg, a man out of time if not yet out of political luck. Here’s hoping, though.

Things weren’t always so rosy for Starmer. As recently as June he was railing against the Mr Boring tag he had been saddled with, in part because his shadow cabinet colleagues kept using it in front of people with notebooks and newspaper columns to write. Now, as he admitted to Talk TV’s Kate McCann last week, it’s starting to look like a good thing.

“Is it time for Mr Boring?” she asked.

“This is not exciting,” he said. “This is causing people real concern”.

“So that’s a yes?”

“Yes.”

Come election day, Tony Blair had most of Scotland in his pocket, of course. Keir Starmer doesn’t now and probably won’t when the day comes. All he has is Edinburgh South, the well-heeled and golf clubby (i.e. not given to supporting left of centre political parties) constituency represented by Ian Murray, Scotland’s only Labour MP. That Murray has made an art form of flying solo doesn’t alter the fact the electoral maths is against Starmer on this side of the Tweed. There is no Red Wall to win back – or if there is it has rude stuff sprayed on it and desperately needs re-pointing.

Some say that doesn’t matter. They point to the 1997 General Election when there were 72 Scottish seats up for grabs but Tony Blair won a 179 seat majority. They note that most of Labour’s election wins would have happened without the Scottish seats. Others beg to differ. The Scottish Fabians, for example, who produced a report in September 2021. “Labour cannot form a majority Government without winning a significant number of Scottish seats,” wrote authors Katherine Sangster and Martin McCluskey. “Of the 150 seats Labour needs to gain to win a stable House of Commons majority, 25 are in Scotland.”

Starmer didn’t attack the Lib Dems in his conference speech, which some see as like being kind to children but others view in more cynical terms as proof of an electoral deal in the offing. He did attack the SNP, however. “We can’t work with them. We won’t work with them. No deal under any circumstances,” he said. Recognising, as the New Stateman magazine puts it, that “there is no route to No 10 for the opposition leader that does not go through Scotland”, and implicitly falling into line with the Scottish Fabians’ view of the situation, he’s trying a different tack instead. He will win back Scottish voters, he told the party conference, by offering to “deliver change” while giving the country “the power and resources to shape its own future whoever’s in power in Westminster.”

Good luck with that.