You’d think former DPP Keir Starmer would be good at defending himself on live TV, wouldn’t you?

Keir Starmer rarely wastes an opportunity, these days, to remind people he was the country’s top prosecutor for a very long time. He put away IRA terrorists, he put away an MP that told lies about a speeding fine. If you cross Sir Keir’s path, Sir Keir reckons, you’d better start to panic.

All of which does not quite explain why this hotshot lawyer, this unyielding force for the righteous, should be on the Good Morning Britain sofa, secure in the knowledge that he hasn’t done anything wrong, but nevertheless shaking like a s****ing dog under the cross-examination not of some other terrifying lawyer – but of Richard Madeley.

As a prosecutor for a very long time, Keir Starmer will certainly have prosecuted very large numbers of people who were completely innocent. One suspects such people did not, when questioned in court, begin their answers with such phrases as, “OK, thank you for asking me that, let me just tackle that one head on,” before becoming nervously incoherent and then not tackling the question head on, but going into a obfuscatory ramble about recording pieces to camera.

Starmer should not be in the least surprised that his political opponents in the Conservative Party – and its supporting newspapers – should have done every last bit of digging they can manage with regard to a photo of him drinking a beer in an office in Durham during lockdown. It was raised in the House of Commons a long time ago. Back then, Starmer said he’d been working and had paused for a takeaway meal with a beer, which is entirely within the rules.

But there’s an election coming up, so naturally the stakes have been raised. Now, Nadine Dorries and others are claiming that a £200 bill for a takeaway, which appears to have included beers as well, is proof that there were 30 people having a party (cost per head, £6.66 for curry, rice, naan and a beer. Seriously, Rishi Sunak needs to just ask Nadine Dorries where she’s buying her Indian takeaways and the cost of living crisis could be over in a second).

It’s a laughable attack, but it is barely any more laughable than Starmer’s defence. He was asked three times on the Today programme on Tuesday morning whether he had been approached by police about the takeaway curry incident. Three times, he refused to answer the question. Twenty-four hours later, on Good Morning Britain, he can confirm that the answer is no.

Susanna Reid told Starmer that, you know, stopping for work and having a beer and a curry sounds a lot like stopping for work and having a bit of a birthday cake. Which it kind of does, except that no one is suggesting the curry was brought in by Starmer’s wife and his interior designer, a point that Starmer declined to make.

There’s also the point, which he just about managed to mumble out from between his lips, that all of the pubs and restaurants were shut, they were on the road in an election campaign – and there was almost no other way to eat.

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Should Keir Starmer ever become prime minister, he will have to try and run the country in the face of an extremely hostile media – one that is becoming ever more hostile. And when you’re as deep in the s*** as Johnson has taken the Tories, you have no choice but to fight dirty, which they will.

That Starmer seems to be too polite, too cautious, too hesitant and too much, frankly, of a nice guy to defend himself when he really doesn’t appear to have done anything wrong at all does not bode well.

Politics is a brutal and brutalising business. Most people chucked in at the deep end grow into it quickly enough (Corbyn, for all his many faults, went on a very steep learning curve on this stuff, with quite a bit of a success, though he came unstuck in the end).

Starmer still finds this stuff extremely difficult, even when it’s as easy as this, and he’s had a very long time now to get better. ”Beergate” is not going to be the end of him, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it has exposed him for being somewhat devoid of some of the most crucial skills of the job.

You would think, would you not, that a former director of public prosecutions would be able to defend himself without making it quite such painful viewing. Beergate should have been brushed off long ago. On this evidence, that it has not been is his fault – and no one else’s.