Mick Hartley

Kathleen Stock on Keir Starmer’s moral vacuum:

Interpretations of his background commitments differ wildly. Peter Hitchens thinks he’s “far-Left” bordering on Trotskyism; Jordan Peterson predicts that should he win, Britain will be “Venezuela for 20 years”. The New Internationalist says Starmer is a “cold-hearted Blairite”, and Corbyn’s former advisor Andrew Murray scornfully dubs him a “centrist liberal”. Bequeathing us a particularly distressing image, George Galloway has declared that “Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak are two cheeks of the same backside”. In terms of sheer range, then, Starmer appears to be the Cate Blanchett of British politics.

This week brought a new performance to pore over, in the form of a filmed walk-and-talk with Gary Neville in the Lake District, a location for Starmer family holidays when he was young. “How did you find this place?” marvelled an incredulous-sounding Neville, as if Sir Keir had hacked through dense jungle foliage rather than trundled up the M6 like everybody else.

Here again, though, the video signalled as little information as a plain white T-shirt worn on matchday. Along with a few repeated manifesto pledges, we learnt that the Labour leader puts “country first, party second”, believes in “action not words”, wants to “return politics to public service”, and is aiming for a “decade of national renewal, fixing the fundamentals”. On “day one, sleeves rolled up”, he plans to “hit the ground running”.

Is there any there there? He's undoubtedly someone with a firm grasp of the political cliche, but as for policies – "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them… well, I have others." All will no doubt be revealed in due course.