STEPHEN GLOVER: He wanted to ditch the Queen. So who is the new flag-waving Keir Starmer kidding?

Earlier this week Sir Keir Starmer presented a party political broadcast beside a Union Flag, promising to ‘rebuild our country’.

Can you imagine his predecessor as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, wrapping himself in the flag? Only if it were the Palestinian one, or possibly the Irish tricolour, in homage to his long-standing apparent support for the IRA.

Sir Keir wants to rebrand his party. A strategy presentation leaked to the Guardian newspaper urges Labour to ‘make use of the Union flag, veterans [and] dressing smartly’ as part of a campaign to win back the trust of disillusioned voters.

According to the Guardian, which has seen the presentation, it is aimed at what the party calls ‘foundation seats’ — those formerly Labour ‘red wall’ constituencies in which many hundreds of thousands of voters defected to the Tories at the December 2019 general election. (Labour has said the report was made by a third party and is not party strategy.)

How likely is it that the Labour Party will succeed in persuading lost voters that it has sincerely embraced Queen and country? Let’s just say that it is going to be an uphill task.

In the first place, Sir Keir himself is going to have his job cut out. We should perhaps not attach too much importance to a video unearthed by the Guido Fawkes website in which he unashamedly boasts that he ‘often used to propose the abolition of the monarchy’. This was said in 2005, which is quite a time ago.

Opinions can change. Of course they can. But the clip inevitably plants seeds of suspicion. It makes us ask whether this smooth, metropolitan, human rights lawyer is really the statesmanlike British patriot he is cracking himself up to be.

By the way, if Sir Keir wants to come across as a measured statesman he had better control himself better than he did after Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons yesterday. He is said to have ‘lost it’ after Boris Johnson rightly accused him of having wanted Britain to stay in the dysfunctional European Medicines Agency.

The normally urbane Labour leader is alleged to have ‘ranted’ at Boris, and according to some reports had to be ‘pulled away’ from him. Sir Keir has subsequently apologised. Still waters run deep.

To return to his endorsement of patriotism: might there be an element of acting? Of trying to appear what he isn’t? In recent months we have seen him — the most ardent of Remainers — drop the cause like a hot potato in the hope of endearing himself to pro-Brexit Labour voters who turned to the Tories.

Let us nevertheless, in a spirit of generosity, assume that his new found enthusiasm for the Union Flag is not a cynical ploy, and that the Labour leader is being utterly genuine.

The trouble is that if ex-Labour voters are prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, they may find it more difficult to extend this indulgence to other members of the Shadow Cabinet.

Admittedly, nearly all the hard-line Corbynistas have been purged from the Labour Front Bench. Yet there are plenty of shadow ministers, all of the so-called soft Left, who would not be very plausible ambassadors for a re-fashioned, proudly patriotic Labour Party.

People might not find especially convincing the spectacle of Emily Thornberry, Shadow International Trade Secretary, lustily singing Rule Britannia. It was she who, in 2014, sneeringly tweeted a photo of a house covered in St George’s flags with a white van parked alongside.

Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy might also not carry instant conviction with red wall voters. In 2019 she refused on BBC1’s Question Time to say whether she thought Churchill was a hero or a villain.

And last month she attracted justifiable ridicule when she praised a report which had suggested replacing Britain’s armed forces with a ‘gender-balanced human security’ corps. I can’t see these sentiments going down well in down-to-earth ex-Labour seats such as Sedgefield, Workington and Ashfield.

Nor can I easily imagine Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner winning back many hearts and minds. Not long ago in the Commons, she called a Tory MP, who in 2019 had won a red wall seat from Labour, ‘scum’.

In any case, I doubt whether these or other Shadow Cabinet ministers would aspire to being enthusiastic members of any such rebranding. Some of them might try, but their hearts would hardly be in it.

Even greater misgivings can be expressed about the dozens of hard-line MPs who were propelled on to Labour backbenches by Left-wing constituency associations in the Corbyn years, and can’t be purged by Sir Keir. They’re not going to join any patriotic bandwagon. They are much more likely to oppose one.

The fact is Sir Keir Starmer leads a divided party — or, more precisely, a party which has fragmented and can’t be easily reassembled. One portion has its roots in parts of the Midlands and North, and is predominantly working-class, pro-Brexit and culturally conservative. The other is mainly metropolitan, culturally progressive, more middle-class and more Left-wing.

Unless these two separated pieces are put back together again, Labour is unlikely to win the next election, the more so as it has been almost wiped out in its traditional stronghold of Scotland. Sir Keir knows this, which is why he has decided to play the patriotic card.

It’s true that Boris Johnson and the Tories have their own divisions, though they are of a different sort. Many traditional Tory voters share with red wall converts similar views about Queen and country, as well as Brexit.

But there are important differences to do with the economy. For the most part, Tory voters in the South don’t want higher taxes and higher public expenditure. Red wall Conservatives generally do — which is why the MPs they voted in, led by Jake Berry, have been demanding more infrastructure spending in the North.

Sooner or later, the causes of fiscal prudence on the one hand and of government largesse on the other are going to collide in the Tory Party, and there will be an almighty explosion. Battles lie ahead for the Prime Minister and Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor.

I suspect, though, that looming Tory economic dissension, however tumultuous, will be easier to patch up than the profound tribal and ideological differences that beset Labour.

Neither Sir Keir nor progressive Labour MPs will convince former Labour voters of their new patriotic agenda unless they are credibly sincere. Pretence is a dangerous ploy in politics. Voters are apt to sniff it out.

According to a Labour official quoted in the Guardian: ‘They don’t believe any of this stuff. They’re just saying whatever they think will get them votes.’ If that is true, few will be persuaded.

Incidentally, I can’t help wondering whether Sir Keir’s outburst yesterday may not have been partly contrived to show red wall ex-Labour voters that he isn’t the desiccated intellectual patsy they may think he is. I expect I am being over suspicious.

Of course, it’s perfectly possible that Boris and the Tories will manage to lose the red wall by disastrous policies, though there is no sign yet of their doing so. But it’s hard to see Sir Keir Starmer convincing voters that the modern Labour Party really stands for Queen and country.