No, Mr Gove, the energised PM is not a Tory in disguise

“Is Keir Starmer a Tory?”, The Spectator asked this week. Its editor, Michael Gove, gave Starmer two cheers” for his shift to the right, saying most Tories would be gasping in admiration” if they could throw off their partisan blinkers.

- ANDREW GRICE

Gove also joked that the prime minister clearly decided to impress the Conservative-supporting magazine as soon as he became its editor.

However, for some Labour MPs, including ministers, Starmer’s rightward tilt is no joke. They judge correctly that cuts to welfare, overseas aid and bureaucracy and tough rhetoric on immigration are designed to appeal to working-class voters in the red wall tempted by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

I think the rightward lurch has been a little overstated.

True, Starmer is adopting more Tory policies than Tony Blair ever did. Yet Starmer’s government has increased public spending by £70bn, raised taxes by £40bn, enhanced workers’ and renters’ rights, set up state-owned GB Energy, and is taking the railways back into public ownership. That hardly makes him a Tory.

“We are a soft-left government with right-wing rhetoric,” one senior Labour figure told me.

On welfare, Starmer is under fire from the left, who want no cuts, and the right, as the Tories claim he has not gone far enough. He is bang in the middle, in a piece of triangulation Blair would approve of, and probably where most voters are.