Starmer’s tenure nearly came to a quick end. In 2021 the party lost a special election in Hartlepool, a Labour heartland, to the Conservatives, which nearly prompted him to quit, aides say.
Starmer’s aides looked to other social democrats across the world for inspiration. They saw how the Biden campaign had succeeded against Trump in 2020 by promising an alternative to chaos. In Germany and Australia, staid center-left politicians, Olaf Scholz and Anthony Albanese, had won victories running tightly disciplined, unshowy campaigns, says Claire Ainsley, who was Starmer’s executive director of policy and now works at the U.S.-based Progressive Policy Institute.
“We needed to target towns and suburbs around the country,” she said. “We couldn’t just be the party of metropolitan voters in the big cities.” That meant ditching a lot of progressive policies to attract back working class voters and present themselves as a party which respected national security and business, she says.
