KEIR Starmer will win the Labour Leadership election, predicts Ivor Gaber, but he won’t be moving into Downing Street any time soon

Difficult to believe I know, but the Labour leadership election still has more than three weeks to run. In fact the contest began the day after Labour was humiliated at the polls as Boris Johnson ran away with an 81-seat majority, which was when the arguments began.

“It was Brexit wot done it” said some (mainly Corbyn supporters) “No it was the Corbyn factor” said others (mainly Starmer supporters). In fact it was a bit of both – but mainly Corbyn, not just because of his unpopularity on the doorstep but because, under a different leadership, Labour might not have made such a mess of its Brexit policy.

So the Labour electorate, made up of MPs and Lords, party members, trade unionists and a few other odds and sods, has a decision to make – continuity Corbyn ie Rebecca Long-Bailey, back-to-the-future Keir Starmer or a plunge into the unknown with Lisa Nandy.

It’s a battle that is of much wider interest and importance than just who leads Labour to its next poll defeat – be that at the local elections this May or the next general election whenever that might be. For in a functioning democracy we need not just a strong government which, given the odd Priti Patel scandal, we have but a strong opposition, which we have not had ever since Corbyn won the Labour leadership in 2015.

Based on the number of nominations he received from local parties and polls of party members it appears that Starmer is well ahead of his rivals

Rebecca Long-Bailey, the anointed Corbyn successor, has been trying to distance herself from Corbyn without losing the votes of his supporters. She has taken a strong line on anti-Semitism in the party and criticised Labour’s election campaign, but she has never really recovered from her opening gaffe – when, in response to a question, she gave Corbyn’s leadership ten out of ten. A more experienced politician would not have fallen into such an obvious elephant trap quite so easily.

She also needs to distance herself from some of her more enthusiastic, and apparently desperate, supporters who are trying to smear Starmer over suggestions that he has not been sufficiently open about how his leadership campaign is being funded. Starmer’s response is that he is simply abiding by the rules that govern MPs’ expenditure and, given that he’s a former Director of Public Prosecutions, playing by the rules of the game is no more than we would expect.

Lisa Nandy, the outsider, neither on the left or right of the party, started well and attracted support from a wider range of local parties and trade unions than had been predicted.

But she galloped into a quagmire when she enthusiastically supported a convicted male child rapist who now identifies as a woman and wanted her crime to be reclassified as having been committed by a woman. Nandy has subsequently tried to downplay the issue but the damage has been done.

So back to the favourite, who many Corbynites see as Blair Mark Two, though reading his pronouncements during the campaign it would be difficult to describe Starmer as anything but a man of the left.

And that’s what could derail his leadership bid – not being of the left but being a man; for there is clearly a significant body of opinion in Labour’s ranks which believes that the time for the party to be led by a woman is long overdue.

However, the strength of that feeling is probably more than outweighed by those members, not perhaps on the Corbynite wing, who after four election defeats are desperate to see a Labour Government and who will vote for Starmer, despite any misgivings.

The only possible fly in the ointment for Starmer is our old friend Brexit, for he’s seen as the architect of Labour’s zig zagging and, given the strength of Leave feeling in many Labour seats in the North and the Midlands, Starmer can’t take his victory for granted.

Nonetheless, I predict that he will win and when he does, anther foolish prediction coming, I predict he will steer Labour back towards the middle ground.

Perhaps not as Blair took it but sufficient to win back those Labour supporters who were less than comfortable with the path that Corbyn and his team were taking.

But the electoral mountain Labour has to climb is steep and it might well take more than one election for Labour to get back into government; so I predict that Starmer will be the next leader of the Labour Party, but Lisa Nandy will be the next Labour prime minister.

Ivor Gaber is professor of political journalism at the University of Sussex and was a consultant to ITV News during the 2019 General Election