This was another competent performance from Keir Starmer – but there’s something missing

According to what can be gleaned from the focus group research, the only flaw the voters can detect (thus far) in the leader of the opposition is a certain “wooden” quality. Don’t get me (or presumably the electorate) wrong, though. Being a bit on the dull side, as he is, isn’t in quite the same league as consigning 50,000 of your fellow citizens to the Covid-19 graveyard, say, or triggering one of the longest, deepest economic recessions in modern times. But still.

It would be better if the Labour leader could loosen up a bit. Sir Keir Starmer is not quite perfect, but then again, they do say it’s our little imperfections that make others love us. Anyhow, it’s all part of the serious, lawyerly, conscientious brand Starmer, the Roundhead to Boris Johnson’s laughing cavalier. He couldn’t change if he tried. He’s not Graham Norton, and he never will be.  

Faced with what must have been a socially distanced near empty studio, Sir Keir’s statement on Covid-19 was unaccountably nervous, like Nigel Farage accidentally wandering into a joint BLM/XR protest. The branches of the solid Starmer oak were just shimmering a little bit against the bright magenta backdrop with the increasingly familiar slogan “New Leadership” (rather than “Sponsored by Cuprinol”).

Given that he is such an accomplished House of Commons man, and has managed to carry Corbynist crowds with him at Labour conferences in the past, it was difficult to see why an audience comprising some spin doctors, a telly crew, plus the courteous Vicki Young (BBC), Kate McCann (Sky) and Robert Peston (ITV) would spook him.

He had no trouble with their questions at any rate, mainly because his policy and his answers were “guided by the science” and therefore unimpeachable in a way, we now know, the prime minister’s are not. Starmer might actually have done better if some of the awkward squad from the Mail or Telegraph had been given the chance to ask him about his own flip-flopping; the bristling hostility might have animated him a bit.  

It was a perfectly competent performance, and the call for a two- or three-week “circuit breaker” lockdown is in line with public opinion, and especially popular with older/more vulnerable voters (where Labour remains way behind the Tories). With a government heading for another coronavirus crisis, it couldn’t really be easier for him. He was fine, and far superior to his last three predecessors. But there’s something missing, you know.