KEIR STARMER has been active recently in defining what his project is. Luciana Berger, who quit Labour for the centrist Change UK party and then joined the Lib Dems has re-joined Labour — and others may follow.

Meanwhile, Starmer has been promoting his political missions, laid out in a speech and a New Statesman article. Although both were worthy enough in a general way, even the austere figure of Ed Balls noted that voters would want some more practical details about what Labour was actually going to do.

Starmer may be more popular than the Tories — but that popularity is lukewarm. A crowd chanted his name in central London recently at a protest against transphobia. “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” chants were a familiar feature of the previous leader’s tenure. Unfortunately for Sir Keir, the recent chant was not a positive one.

The Labour leader has also issued a diktat that Corbyn will not be a Labour candidate in Islington North and he appeared in Kiev to underline that he is just as keen a warmonger as any Tory it seems.

At the obvious level, the Starmer project is about defeating the Tories and winning an election. A recent editorial in Rupert Murdoch’s Times newspaper moaned that Starmer’s Labour remains relatively light on policy — naturally, the Times wants Starmer to distance himself further from unions and strikes.

Since Starmer continues to stick to generalisations — Angela Rayner has tweeted that Labour is both pro-business and pro-unions — the Times has now decided that after the Windsor Framework, Sunak might be a better leader, particularly as he is not Boris Johnson or Liz Truss.

The reaction of pro-Starmer commentators to recent events gives more of a clue about the project. In the Guardian, Polly Toynbee opined that it didn’t really matter whether Corbyn won as an independent in Islington North. This happy-go-lucky approach to elections was not I think something Toynbee had when she stood as an SDP candidate against Labour in the early 1980s. Then she understood the symbolic importance of Labour losses.

Labour, as the late Ralph Miliband demonstrated in his book Parliamentary Socialism, is above all an electoral party. Yet a Guardian editorial on Starmer’s diktat, which advised the left in the Labour Party to back him or leave, noted winning elections is about attracting wide support — not about telling hundreds of thousands of Labour voters to clear off.

Labour may well win the next election against a backdrop of Tory implosion and SNP crisis — but Starmer, verbal attacks on the Tories aside, doesn’t seem as obsessed by this as he is in bashing and purging the left.

It may be that the real Starmer project is to build a centrist grouping in British politics in which the left doesn’t feature. Winning elections can come later, except that without the left, as previous Labour leaders have (often grudgingly) noted, winning elections is difficult.

Starmer’s New Statesman article on his mission makes a nod to social democracy, and some of the contents, for example on the decentralisation of political power, and the emphasis on what individuals do, does echo the SDP’s 1981 Limehouse declaration.

Here perhaps is a possible clue to what Starmer is specifically up to. In the early 1980s, centrists decided to build a new party (based on years of right-wing Labour organisation) and leave Labour very broadly to the left. Four decades on the reverse strategy may be in play, where the centrists control Labour and push the left into a separate organisation.

Given the depth of the economic and social crisis, a re-tread of recent history may not amount to much.

Keith Flett is a socialist historian. Follow him on Twitter @kmflett.