Sir Keir Starmer has said he wants to be remembered as “the person that saved Labour” from extinction.
In his final interview before leaving No 10, the Prime Minister said his main legacy was rooting anti-Semitism out of the party and making it electable again after its historic defeat in 2019.
He made the remarks during a trip to Kyiv, in which he also revealed that he had never harboured ambitions of reaching the top office.
Sir Keir was elected as Labour leader in April 2020, after Jeremy Corbyn led the party to its worst result in more than 80 years at the 2019 general election.
Its vote share slumped to 32 per cent, with only 203 MPs, as Boris Johnson’s landslide victory extended the Tories’ stay in power beyond a decade.
Yet just over four years later, Labour returned to office with one of the biggest majorities in modern history as the Conservatives were nearly wiped out.
Asked how he would like to be remembered, Sir Keir told Sky News: “As the person that saved the Labour Party, turned it into a party that could face the public again.
“We were a party that were found to be institutionally anti-Semitic, that was not fit to actually face the country and the electorate.
“We turned that around and we did that in a relatively short period of time. It was four and a quarter years from me taking over the Labour Party to walking into Downing Street with a landslide majority. That is hard bloody work.”
Under the leadership of Mr Corbyn, the veteran Left-winger, Labour had been dogged by accusations that it was institutionally anti-Semitic.
At the time of the 2019 election, the party was the subject of an investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which found that the party had breached the equality act over how it handled complaints of anti-Semitism.
The torrent of negative headlines over anti-Semitism was seen as a key factor in its loss under Mr Corbyn, alienating many moderate voters.
PM ‘proud to hand over to Burnham’
Sir Keir spent the early part of his leadership purging the Left from many positions of power within the party and clamping down on anti-Jewish sentiment.
He commissioned an inquiry in 2020, led by Martin Forde, a barrister, which found that Mr Corbyn’s supporters had “adopted a position of denialism and conspiracy theories” over claims of anti-Semitism within the party.
The Prime Minister insisted that because of his work, Andy Burnham could go on to win the next election, despite Labour’s slump in the polls.
He said: “We’ve built the foundation for this now and Labour can go on and win that election. I’m proud to hand over the party in good shape to Andy Burnham, and hand over the country in good shape to Andy Burnham.”
Elsewhere in his final interview, the Prime Minister admitted that, when first elected as an MP in 2015, he had no ambition to end up in No 10.
The former human rights lawyer said that he “thought with a bit of luck that … I might become attorney general one day”, but he was convinced to run for the Labour leadership because he saw that “our party was on the brink”.