I intend to do whatever is necessary to fix that.” © Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters Giving a brief interview in a book-lined office, he conceded: “Very often we’ve been talking to ourselves, instead of to the country, and we’ve lost the trust of working people, particularly in places like Hartlepool. It was late afternoon before he emerged into the public eye. The Labour leader declined to answer questions as he left his north London home on Friday morning, having previously said he would “carry the can” for his party’s performance. Starmer’s team were acutely conscious in advance that early results from Thursday’s bumper round of elections would be the toughest for them – kicking off with the Hartlepool byelection but including many challenging English councils too.īut the scale of the defeat in Hartlepool still appears to have taken them by surprise. In the aftermath of Labour’s crushing general election defeat in 2019, Keir Starmer’s appeal to despondent party members and MPs was – as one said at the time – as a “comfort blanket”.ĭecent, serious and unencumbered by baggage from Labour’s factional forever-war, many hoped he would polish the party’s image and build an election-winning machine, without ditching many of the policies of the Jeremy Corbyn years.Īfter a chaotic 48 hours of briefings and counter-briefings, sackings and silences, many senior party figures were asking themselves on Sunday whether their confidence had been misplaced.
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