Voices: Keir Starmer was against proportional representation all along – what else hasn’t he told us?

The leaders of the two main parties both went back this week on things they seemed to have said when they were campaigning for the top job. On Thursday, Keir Starmer’s spokesperson said he has a “longstanding view against proportional representation”.

It is a view he kept well hidden during the 2020 Labour leadership election, when he said: “On electoral reform, we’ve got to address the fact that millions of people vote in safe seats and they feel their voice doesn’t count. That’s got to be addressed. We will never get full participation in our electoral system until we do that at every level.”

At the time, I thought his choice of words was curious, but that it clearly implied a proportional system. The Electoral Reform Society put out a press release headed: “Keir Starmer announces support for … proportional representation.” Starmer did not complain.

On Monday, meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary, confirmed to a private meeting of Conservative MPs what Michael Gove, her cabinet colleague, had said to a select committee a month ago and none of them had noticed: that the government was going to keep most EU-derived law.

This was not quite what Rishi Sunak had said during the leadership contest with Liz Truss, when he put out a video in which, to the strains of “Ode to Joy”, the EU anthem, an actor fed documents called “EU legislation” into a shredder. A caption said: “In his first 100 days as prime minister, Rishi Sunak will review or repeal post-Brexit EU laws … all 2,400 of them.”

Carl Gardner, the legal commentator, noticed that this wording, too, was less than categorical, and that Sunak’s formal manifesto for the leadership promised only to scrap “all EU laws that hold the economy back” and then only “before the next election”.

While the public overwhelmingly thinks Boris Johnson is untrustworthy, we tend to have a more positive view of Starmer and Sunak. They are politicians, of course, so a certain slipperiness is written into the job description; but they both trade on their image as relatively honest.

I doubt if Sunak’s “betrayal” will damage him as much as The Daily Telegraph thinks it might. Retained EU law is a technical subject, and it seems sensible for the government to take its time over it, while the ERG faction of Conservative Eurosceptics seems to have more or less blown itself out.

Starmer’s apostasy, on the other hand, is more dangerous for him. Labour Party members are overwhelmingly in favour of proportional representation. What Professor Tim Bale calls “the party in the media” – that is, the Labour-leaning part of the commentariat – tends to be soggily in favour.

Both groups say they understand that Starmer had to say one thing to become leader and needs to say another to win a general election – but this might be a betrayal too far. He can drop renationalisation, but not the d’Hondt divisor.

Even if they understand that Labour must win under the existing voting system and that change is unlikely to be a priority after the election, they wonder what Starmer really does believe in – “apart from himself”, as one historian of the party put it to me this week.

Fortunately, the Labour leader set out to answer that question in an interview with The Economist on Wednesday. There have been several long interviews that have purported to show us “the real Keir Starmer”, in which we have been reminded again that his father was a toolmaker and his mother a nurse – but none of them has really penetrated the forcefield around him.

This interview was different in that it didn’t try to be personal, but to test him on policy and to try to find out what kind of prime minister he would be. It was hardly more successful than the personal interviews, as Starmer kept his answers at a level of mind-numbing generality. A Labour government under him would “reach out and govern in a more consensual way”. It would work in partnership with business, while giving companies the “certainty” that they need.

Even at the level of abstract principles, however, Starmer contradicted himself. Asked how he would achieve economic growth, he said “one of the first levers we need to pull is to put decision-making closer to communities and people affected”. Yet when asked a more specific question about whether a Labour government would take on Nimbyism on housing, he said: “I think we have to take this on.”

He said Sunak had “backed down now in the face of opposition on targets”. But that opposition to targets for house building comes from precisely the “communities and people affected” that he wants to empower.

When asked a more specific question about whether the green belt would remain, he retreated to: “Look, we’ll come up with a set of proposals. But I’m absolutely clear in my mind, the status quo is not good enough. We have to change this. That will require us to be bold when it comes to things like planning.”

The trouble is that he said the voting system had to be changed once – or, rather, that its flaws had to be “addressed”. So his boldness is ambiguous.

And he has the same problem with the central message of the Economist interview, which is that a Labour government would keep taxes down. He said that he and Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, “intend to resist the pull that so many people urge on us: that the first place a Labour government goes is to tax. The first place the next Labour government will go is to grow.”

In case his interviewers missed it, he repeated the soundbite in a slightly different form: “The wider project is not to simply go down the tax route; it is to go down the growth route.” Tony Blair and Gordon Brown said the same thing before the 1997 election: they had a clever line about the social security bill being the cost of failure, and pretended that they could pay for better public services by getting people off welfare and into work.

New Labour was fortunate in that it inherited a growing economy, but even then it put up taxes to pay for the NHS. It seems likely that Next Labour would do the same – it is just another of those things that Starmer hasn’t got round to telling us yet.