Starmer’s ‘keep calm and carry on’ cool under fire may not be enough to save him

Keir Starmer tried to make a virtue of not announcing anything at his news conference this morning. When a journalist accused him of failing to offer anything new to people worried about their bills going up because of the war, he said: “That is the point.”

The government had already taken action to cut bills before the war, he said, and it was not going to be panicked, he implied, into rash action before it knew the scale of the problem.

Instead, he had come to the lectern to announce two meetings. Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, will host a meeting of 35 nations that intend to “push, as one, for maritime security across the Gulf”. In other words, to try to open the Strait of Hormuz – but only “after the fighting has stopped”. Then there will be a “new summit with our EU partners” to promote even closer economic and security cooperation than was agreed last year.

This was the real political message – directed at his party by a prime minister who still feels that his position is insecure. A two-part message that is music to many Labour ears: boo to Trump and hurrah for Europe.

Starmer said that “whatever the pressure and the noise” – code for “Donald Trump” – “I’m not going to change my position on the war”. And by emphasising security cooperation with the EU, the morning after President Trump had hinted that America would ditch Nato, Starmer’s rhetorical turn from America to Europe was unmistakable.

He even answered a question about choosing between America and Europe by saying, “I’m not going to choose…”, before going on to choose: “... but I do think when it comes to defence, security, energy and the economy, we need a stronger relationship with Europe”.

This may be what Labour’s pro-EU base wants to hear. The emphasis is certainly very different from the Reform-facing language of the long-forgotten Morgan McSweeney era – it is now seven whole weeks since the No 10 chief of staff departed.

But it does not seem to offer the reassurance that the wider public might be seeking at a time when everyone knows an economic disaster is heading our way. On that, Starmer offered some high-flown oratory, delivered with the animation of a stuffed pigeon. “It is the job of government to meet these moments,” he said. “I am not prepared to ask the British people, once again, to go through a crisis, come out of it and say ‘business as usual’ – back to the status quo.”

And that was it, apart from listing all the things that the government had planned to do before the missiles began raining on Tehran. He tried to present this as evidence of his steadiness of purpose rather than inertia in the face of a coming crisis already visible in the distance.

Instead of “meeting this moment”, therefore, he said that it is “very difficult to assess what might be needed”. In answer to a journalist asking when people might learn more about the kind of support that might be available, he said the timing of “getting the Strait of Hormuz open begins to answer that question”.

He stuck to Rachel Reeves’s words from an overnight interview, in which she said it is “too early” to say who will get additional help. He did not even repeat what she said, which is that any support would be targeted, unlike the flat-rate subsidy paid to everyone by Liz Truss’s government. “I want to learn the lessons of the past,” Reeves said, “because when Russia invaded Ukraine, the richest, the best-off third of households got more than a third of the support.”

What that means is that we will have to wait and see. It would seem that “meeting the moment” means “let us see how bad it gets, then we can decide”. It is perfectly sensible not to rush into panic measures that could be counterproductive, and Reeves is right to prefer targeted support, but it leaves a vacuum into which stories such as the Telegraph’s April Fool about Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, suggesting people should save electricity by drinking cold tea, come to be believed.

“Keep calm and carry on” may be the right message, but it sounds awfully like Lance Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army shouting, “Don’t panic!”