Dreary Keir Starmer makes Iain Duncan Smith sound exciting

It might have been an inside job. The saboteur who threw a handful of glitter over Sir Keir Starmer at the start of his speech turned the Labour leader into a hero for a few seconds. The assailant was frogmarched away while protesting in a very expensive accent. ‘True democracy is citizen-led’ he brayed, using the cultivated tones of a duke giving orders to his grouse-beaters. On the podium Sir Keir shrugged his jacket to the floor and revealed a manly torso. His white shirt was bulging in all the right places (and a few of the wrong ones). He stood before the conference like a veteran wrestler, an undefeated champion, a sturdy prize-fighter who throws upstart challengers out of the ring. They loved him for it. They stood and cheered so wildly that he had to raise his hands, as if signalling a six, and beg them to resume their seats.

Then his speech began and he reverted to his usual droning delivery. Sir Keir sounds like IDS with a flat battery. He could be an old chainsaw grinding away in a condemned orchard.

The speech had been leaked in advance and it contained three important promises. To heal. To modernise. And to build. Sir Keir included a strange new mantra. ‘Mission government.’ He kept repeating this phrase and letting it hang in the air, as if its significance were understood by everyone. But its syntactical function was very hard to pin down. Sometimes it worked as a chapter heading. Sometimes it sounded like the decisive point in an argument. ‘Mission government.’ So there. But what is ‘mission government’? Is it a government with a mission? Perhaps it’s a mission that operates through government. Or it could refer to Labour’s mission, namely, to form a government. Very puzzling. You’re unlikely to hear yourself saying ‘mission government’ unless you’re a fully programmed young thruster in Sir Keir’s inner circle.

He loves the idea that his incoming government will pick up where the last Labour administration left off. He recited Tony Blair’s greatest achievements (apart from Iraq and the private finance initiatives). ‘Crime cut by a third’, he said, ‘the minimum wage. Peace in Northern Ireland.’ He added a favourable statistic about waiting-lists and then he gave up. ‘I’m not going to do the whole list. I haven’t got time,’ he said. That’s how widely admired and loved Blair is. Even his fans run out of steam when singing his praises.

Sir Keir vowed that 1.5 million new homes will rise like spring daisies under his administration.

‘We’ll have shovels in the ground and cranes in the sky and we’ll build the next generation of Labour new towns.’

To do this, he won’t have to sacrifice the green belt, of course, as that was created by Labour ‘in the first place.’ Instead he’ll build new towns on the ‘grey belt’ as he called it. ‘Car parks and dreary wastelands.’ He may have to rephrase that pledge for the manifesto. ‘Vote Labour and live in a new house on a car park.’

Sir Keir was worried that he hadn’t lowered the crowd’s spirits enough so he began to reminisce about the brutality and deprivation of his early years. ‘I grew up working-class and I’ve been fighting all my life,’ he said. The family home was a ‘pebble-dash semi’ where he endured the ‘cost-of-living crisis of the 1970s.’ His father made tools for a living. (Did you know that?) His mother had trouble moving her legs and she struggled to walk for a few paces, even while enjoying a holiday in her beloved Lake District.

Sir Keir’s childhood is like Jimmy Savile’s career. The more you hear about it, the more depressing it gets. Even now, his loved-ones are beset by penury and toil. During the pandemic his sister, a care-worker, faced ‘unimaginable pressure’ as she completed 14-hour shifts. And things haven’t improved for her in the slightest. ‘It’s a struggle every week,’ he revealed, ‘just to make ends meet.’

The poor woman. Why doesn’t he give her a job in his office? Her first task could be to translate ‘mission government’ into English.