Who’s afraid of Keir Starmer?

Fear of the Labour party has long been the most powerful Tory weapon. During every election campaign, the Tory strategy is to talk up the threat of Labour: the demon-eyed Tony Blair, ‘Red’ Ed Miliband or the Corbynite menace. Tories, for all their quirks and flaws, keep the other guys, the dangerous ones, out of power.

Rishi Sunak may struggle to revive this argument at the next election. The economy is in recession, the NHS is collapsing, national debt has doubled. After four Conservative prime ministers, public services are in such a state that strikes don’t make much difference. When things go back to ‘normal’, the trains, border control and ambulances are still in crisis.

Some interesting solutions are, at least, floating around. How about allowing NHS patients to refer themselves to specialists, cutting the burden on GPs? Or letting victims decide the punishment for antisocial behaviour? How about an Office for Value for Money, to stop so much taxpayers’ cash being squandered? But all of these are coming from the Labour party, which can claim to be providing fresh ideas in a way that was unthinkable just a few years ago.

Sir Keir Starmer can be accused of being a stupefying bore whose leadership strategy doesn’t go beyond tut-tutting at Tory errors. But this play-it-safe lawyer, the first knight of the realm ever to lead the Labour party, is hard to demonise. He has spent the past three years fighting Corbynites and winning. Many of his victories have barely made the news: out of 77 Labour selection battles under his leadership, for example, only one openly left-wing candidate has been selected. He has ended Momentum’s momentum.

If today’s polls were tomorrow’s election results, the number of Tory MPs would halve to about 140 while the number of Labour MPs would roughly double to 400.