If narratives shape politics, what is the story Keir Starmer wants to tell about Britian? What kind of story will he craft about the country he wants to lead on “a rediscovery of who we are” as he put it in a short, sombre victory speech outside 10 Downing Street on Friday afternoon. David Lammy, the new foreign secretary, spoke to me recently of the need to accept “the world as it is” not as the left or liberals wish it to be. This is not an idealistic Labour government, as Tony Blair’s was in 1997, when he heralded the beginning of a new liberal progressive era. These are much darker times and Starmer, because of his realism and pragmatism, seems well suited to them.

His achievement cannot be overstated. Since he succeeded Jeremy Corbyn as leader, he has completely remade the Labour Party, which at the end of 2019 was a rotten shell: polluted by antisemitism, controlled by the radical left, rancid with self-loathing, and riven by factions. The Labour MPs I spoke to back then believed the party would be out of power for at least a decade. Would it even survive the new cross-class, pro-Brexit political realignment promised by the Boris Johnson Conservatives, which had won multiple seats in the old Labour heartlands of the Midlands and the north of England?

Consider the scale of Labour’s victory. In one parliamentary term it has gone from its worst general election defeat since 1935 to a great victory and a Commons majority of 172. The Conservatives, the so-called natural party of government, have been routed, punished by voters for years of dysfunction and misrule. The tortuous process of Brexit and the repeated broken promises on levelling up, immigration and much else have broken the party. It seemed fitting that Liz Truss, removed by her own MPs as prime minister after 49 days in 2022, lost her seat.

In Scotland the forward march of the SNP, hegemonic since its resounding victory in the 2011 Scottish Parliament elections, has been halted. Support for Labour is broad but shallow in the country and yet it is Britain’s last truly national party: now dominant in much of England, Scotland and Wales.

We live an age of highly volatile politics – the Conservative collapse and the Reform Party surge are testament to that - and Starmer understands how restive the mood in the country is. He spoke outside Downing Street of a “weariness in the heart of the nation”. This was far from the soaring rhetoric of Tony Blair in 1997 who sensed voters wanted to be told a new national story – about an open, dynamic, modernising Britain that would be at the forefront of the new liberal globalisation. Blair was 41 when he became prime minister, a leader glowing with the aura of the young, the liberal-modern, the progressive and the new. Contrast the social atmosphere in the country then with today.

Starmer is 61, the oldest man to become prime minister since James Callaghan in 1976. He is a veteran lawyer and speaks like one. At times, he can sound less like a national leader than a permanent secretary in the civil service: judge me on my commitment to public service! He is a cautious man who has much to be cautious about. His watchwords as he spoke outside Downing Street were dignity, respect, security, stability. All good, sensible words even if certain phrases made him sound like an exhausted survivor speaking at the end of a Shakespearean tragedy, harrowed by what had gone before, the chaos that had been, and warning of the need for patience and reconciliation.

During the bleakest period of the Corbyn years and then after the epic defeat in December 2019, when Labour people were despairing, one

man did not accept that the party could not win again after only one term: Morgan McSweeney. He was head of Labour Together, now a well-funded think tank but then an informal advisory group, and a brilliant strategist and campaigner with a background in local government.

He had long been in search of a candidate capable of implementing the plan that he believed would return Labour to power: address the country not the party, purge the left, and build trust on the economy, security, defence and law and order. That candidate turned out to be Keir Starmer, a career lawyer who had entered parliament late, aged 52, but whose politics were fluid and defined by pragmatism, personal ambition and the ability to master a brief.

The plan then for Labour’s return to power pre-existed Starmer: I know because I used to be a guest at Labour Together dinners in London during the Corbyn years and was privy to some of the discussions. But without Starmer it would not have been implemented.

I recall having a cup of tea one afternoon with Starmer and his chief aide, Chris Ward, now a newly elected MP, at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool in 2017. Starmer had resigned from Corbyn’s first shadow cabinet. He had supported Owen Smith in his ill-fated attempt to oust Corbyn in 2016 in the aftermath of the vote for Brexit. I asked Starmer whether, because of Corbyn’s 2017 general election campaign, in which Labour had won 40 per cent of the vote and deprived the Conservatives of their majority, he would now return to the shadow cabinet to demonstrate his willingness to work with Corbyn and campaign for a second Brexit referendum.

He did not answer directly, but I could see from his expression that he was preparing to do just that. He knew that the next leader of Labour, which he wanted to be, would come from inside Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. No perceived enemy of the left could win control of the party at that time of paranoia and division.

One of the criticisms of Starmer was that he had no politics and did not know how to do politics well. He was new to the game. He was not part of the guild of special advisors who had been fast-tracked into safe seats at a young age. His style seemed buttoned-up, passive, ultra-cautious, constricted. He was not a fluent or nimble speaker. What he had, however, were instincts and a particular class consciousness formed by the upheavals of the 1970s and 1980s. His upbringing in a working-class family in Surrey – his father was a toolmaker who worked in a factory, as he likes to remind us, and his mother was a nurse who suffered from chronic poor health – have informed his politics in enduring and interesting ways.

He flirted with radical left politics as a student and young man in London, but his energies and serious attention were always on developing his career (when not playing football). In time he became a leading human rights lawyer and part of the liberal bourgeois metropolitan left but it was not his natural milieu. Even today he has the watchfulness, slight insecurities and instincts of an outsider. He dislikes snobbery and entrenched social hierarchy. He especially despises the insouciance and carelessness of Boris Johnson and his entitled chums.

Starmer observed how uncomfortable his father felt about working in a factory, as if he were embarrassed to be a tradesman. Johnson used to mock Starmer at the dispatch box as a “lefty lawyer” and “Corbynista in an Islington suit” but when Starmer speaks about the dignity of labour he means it.

Because he is not an ideologue, he is also flexible. “Keir is steely, relentlessly hard working, quietly ruthless and meticulous at implementing a strategy,” one of his closest cabinet colleagues told me. He does not trust easily but delegates and listens carefully to those whose guidance he values, especially McSweeney, Rachel Reeves, the new Chancellor, and Sue Gray, his chief of staff. Close colleagues say there is an elusive quality to him, an essential reserve and mystery. He reveals little of who he truly is or what he really feels and is fiercely protective of the privacy of his wife, Victoria (“Vic”), and their two children. But his focus is unremitting and dedication absolute.

“This Tory line that he doesn’t work hard enough is nonsense,” one cabinet colleague told me. “He works too hard! He’s a workaholic. He studies his briefs. He’s deliberative. But in government you need to make quick decisions. He will need to learn how to do that. And he’ll need to start listening to more people.”

Starmer’s top team - Lammy, Reeves, Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting, Bridget Philipson - share a class sensibility. Their early lives were shaped by parental separations, family breakdown or psychological and economic hardship. They were not born into the bourgeois metropolitan liberal-left. They never felt socially at ease as they made their way at university or in their early careers. “I’ve been underestimated all my life,” Reeves said to me. “Keir feels that he is always being underestimated,” one of his aides told me.

Lammy was recently a guest at the Trooping of the Colour ceremonies in Whitehall. He shared a terrace with Boris Johnson, James Cleverly and other senior Tories. But something about the mood unsettled him. “There was a sort of demob happiness about them, a sort of casual frippery, a certain kind of public-school smallness,” Lammy told me. “They are not the class of people that Britain needs to run it now … these people have squandered something. It just spoke of a class of people who have no real sense of the world as it is, whether it is in our own country or the world as we find it today.”

The suggestion is that Starmer’s people are the right class for these times. “We are in a hurry,” Reeves says, after more than 14 years of opposition and having endured the Corbyn civil wars.

But what happens if Starmer’s cautious, incremental style of patriotic social democracy does not create the change he wants? What happens if Reeves’ economic reforms do not generate the growth she promises? What about the forces gathering out in the country that the radical left and the radical right, in their different ways, are seeking to channel?

At his victory speech in Clacton, Nigel Farage, arch disruptor and leader of Reform, the non-party party, or self-styled people’s army, said that he “was coming for Labour voters”. Reform came second in 98 constituencies and won 14 per cent of the vote but has only five MPs. Under a proportional voting system, the party would have had perhaps as many as 90 MPs. The first past the post system conspires against insurgent parties. But can they be permanently suppressed or closed out?

“There is massive change coming,” Farage told me. “Fundamental electoral reform is coming. And with that, the Labour Party and the Conservative Party frankly will barely exist.”

Labour MPs, even as they celebrate their remarkable victory, are already anxious about Reform, the Farage effect and the anarchic forces unlocked by him. And Starmer’s advisors are haunted by the struggles of Olof Scholz, the German Social Democratic Chancellor who also speaks of respect and the dignity of labour but has not halted the rise of the nationalist populist right. He seems destined for defeat at the federal election next year.

Unlike some of his MPs, Keir Starmer is not yet worried about Reform and will not panic. He has an approach and style, a method even, and has asked for patience. His cabinet appointments almost exactly mirror the shadow cabinet: he likes colleagues to know their briefs and prizes stability.

Outside Downing Street on Friday, Starmer began to tell a story about the mood in the country. He spoke of the need to heal wounds and of a weariness in the heart of the nation. At times he sounded like an old-style conservative Anglican clergyman. He needs now to deepen the narrative, not just to tell people who he is and what he wants and believes but to show the country where it is going and what it might become. “I want us to be a young country,” Blair said in 1995. “We will be a young country, equipped for the future with a just society, a new politics and a clear understanding of its role in the world.” That was then.

What does Keir Starmer want Britan to be in 2024 and beyond?

He will need to tell that story before too long.

Jason Cowley is editor of the New Statesman