Shoulder to shoulder

If you agree with your opponent's position, don't attack it

Every year during party conference season, the main party leaders are interviewed in successive weeks on the BBC’s flagship Sunday morning politics show. This year, one of the questions put to both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer was about what they admired about each other. Sunak was slightly stumped by the question (“I’m not interested in personalities… what I’d say is you’ve got to take a stand on things”). This was a pretty poor answer, given what a softball question it was, and given that it didn’t make much sense, and given what a perfect opportunity it provided to make himself look good by pretending to make his opponent look good - and so it revealed a weakness, both in his inability to acknowledge the good in others and in his inability to think on his feet.

Starmer, unlike Sunak, had a week to prepare for the question, so the fact that he answered it doesn’t mean we can credit him with quick thinking. He and his team would have spent some time thinking about what the best answer was. This is what he went for:

“I admire the fact that on the day he was elected prime minister, he made a point of phoning me for a one-to-one conversation and in that conversation we agreed that we would, you know, challenge each other robustly on the things that we needed to challenge each other on, but when it came to national security and to terrorism, we would stand together and I think, I admire that, I think it was the right thing to do, I think for a prime minister and leader of the opposition to say, there are some things of such national importance that we will work together and stand together, is good for our country, so I admire that.”

This is, of course, not really about Sunak at all. It is an answer designed to say good things about Starmer: that he cares about national security, and that he is someone Sunak can “stand together” with on that issue - Sunak’s equal, not his subordinate. But I think we can also take at face value Starmer’s account of the conversation he and Sunak had. It sounds like the kind of thing both leaders - most leaders - would say. 

Which brings us to this graphic released by the Conservative Party today:

The party tweeted it with this caption:

Whatever this is, it’s not the standing together on national security that Keir Starmer said he and Rishi Sunak had committed to. To be fair to Sunak, he would not have been aware of this tweet, and he probably still isn’t. But the people responsible for it - from Greg Hands down - should have been aware of the commitment, and seem not to have been. There used to be a time when researchers in the Conservative Research Department would watch and listen to and write down everything senior Labour politicians said, and keep it on file. Maybe they don’t bother with that any more.

But the ignorance of, or willingness to disregard, a Prime Ministerial edict is not the worst thing about this attack. And nor is what James Ball describes as the “Incredibly tacky politicisation of a horrendous humanitarian crisis” (maybe I spent too long working on this kind of thing, but I wasn’t outraged by it even if I should have been). The bigger problem is that, once again, it doesn’t make any sense.

There is no question at all that Labour is split over the crisis in Israel and Gaza (the Tories are too, but much, much less). The bald facts in the headlines pasted in the graphic - the revolt, the shadow ministerial resignation, the lost councillors - are real. But the political question for the Conservatives is what, if anything, this tells you about Labour and about Keir Starmer. And the answer this attack reveals is: they don’t know.

Starmer’s position is, as everyone has noticed, not one that has universal support within his party. But while there have been shifts in emphasis over the weeks since the crisis started in terms of the extent to which Labour has been willing to criticise aspects of Israel’s response to the October 7th atrocities - as there have been on the Government side - Starmer and the front bench have not moved from their position of not backing a ceasefire. That is why there is so much disquiet among some Labour MPs, some councillors and some members who believe that there should be a ceasefire and that it matters whether Labour calls for one. Starmer may be wrong (cards on the table: I don’t think he is wrong, but this is not a newsletter about whether I am right about foreign policy). But he isn’t being weak.¹ Indeed, the newspaper headlines in the graphic make that clear.

The tweet’s claim that Starmer “hasn’t changed Labour” relies on an assumption that Labour’s position would be the same under Jeremy Corbyn. That’s absurd, and everyone knows it, whether they sympathise with Starmer’s view or Corbyn’s. Not for the first time, a Conservative attack on Labour is demonstrating that they still haven’t worked out what their attack on Labour is.

The Tories are arguing that Keir Starmer is bad because he’s standing shoulder to shoulder with Rishi Sunak on a national security issue even though this causes him political difficulty. There are certainly arguments that this reflects badly on Starmer - but they all rely on saying that he is wrong on the substance of the issue. Plenty of people in the Labour Party are saying that. The Tories can’t say it. So they’d be better off - as Sunak promised Starmer in the first place - not saying anything at all.

This post exists because two people separately tweeted to me about this Conservative graphic, suggesting that it would be a good subject for me to write about in Dividing Lines (I can’t find their tweets now, but I promise they aren’t just a literary device to give me an excuse to write this post). Thanks to both of them, and to everyone who has supported this newsletter by subscribing, liking, sharing and recommending it. Do keep it up. It’s not that it couldn’t exist without you, but there wouldn’t be as much point.

1. There is an argument that Starmer is being weak: that he is maintaining his position not because of conviction or principle but because he is a tool of the Americans, or the Israelis, or the Jews, or whoever. This is not, to put it mildly, the Conservative Party’s position on opposition to a ceasefire, and so they are not saying it.