James Forsyth James Forsyth

Starmer passes the Mary Cameron test

Keir Starmer’s political position is stronger than people would have expected a few months ago. The improvement in Labour’s poll position is giving him more personal authority within the party, allowing him to move on from the Corbyn era faster than expected. ‘The Labour party has the smell of power in its nostrils now and that’s enough to anaesthetise about 90 per cent of them’, one Johnson confidant fretted to me recently. As I say in the Times today, one particular benefit of this for him is that it allows him to sidestep Tory attempts to drag him into culture war skirmishes.

One reason why culture war attacks bounce off Keir Starmer is that he passes the Mary Cameron test. Back in February 2016 at a particularly bad-tempered PMQs, David Cameron told Jeremy Corbyn that his mother would tell the Labour leader to ‘put on a proper suit, do up your tie, and sing the national anthem’. This former director of public prosecutions ticks all these boxes. He is ‘not threatening to middle England’, admits one Downing Street source. He passes the blink test — you can imagine him standing in the doorway of No. 10 — in a way that Corbyn never did. The Covid-19 crisis also suits his emphasis on competence and administrative ability. It turns his dullness into a virtue.

There is, obviously, a long time until the next election and, in many ways, the remarkable thing is that the Tories tend to be level or narrowly ahead in the polls despite everything that has happened. But it’s clear that Starmer is a more formidable opponent than many Tories expected.

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