Keir Starmer is playing politics on easy mode

It must be great fun being Keir Starmer at the moment.

Eighteen months ago he was asking aides ‘why does everybody hate us?’ in the wake of Labour’s disastrous defeat at the Hartlepool by-election. Now scoring points off the Tories is like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel.

The Conservatives have ceded so much political territory that the Labour leader doesn’t even properly have to upset his base among soft-left progressives in order to woo back traditionalist Red Wall voters or even to resonate with diehard Tories.

Hence was he able to exploit for his own political ends the tax-raising, growth-killing Budget delivered by Jeremy Hunt last week when he appeared on a special edition of Chopper’s Politics, the podcast run by the Telegraph’s Christopher Hope.

‘We have got to grow our economy because that’s the only way we can actually make the progress that we need to make. On taxes, the highest tax since the second world war, this really is anti-Conservative stuff’ said Starmer.