Keir Starmer looks into the middle distance as he explains that “complacency is the enemy”. We are discussing how, after more than a decade in the political wilderness, the Labour Party is preparing for power. But before Starmer can finish his sentence on the importance of staying “utterly focused”, we are interrupted by a thud-thud-thud on the window. We are sitting in Smithills Hall, a Grade I-listed manor just outside Bolton, and the leader of the opposition has been recognised by a passing dog-walker. The man, perhaps in his fifties, presses his face to the glass and waves.
Starmer’s face relaxes into a smile and he nods. He has spent the past hour in the faded grandeur of Smithills Hall’s dining room, listening to climate campaigners speak as part of a nationwide project called Letters to Tomorrow. There, pensioners read out letters addressed to great-grandchildren who are yet to be born; children shared their anxieties for friends and for their older selves. Starmer has promised to make action on the climate crisis central to Labour’s offer, and on a grey day at the end of November, the response in the north of England was warm compared with that which greeted him there in 2021. When he campaigned for the Hartlepool by-election that spring, the Labour leader was met with indifference and, at times, contempt.
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