A great piece in the DT.
Starmer is a slightly over-weight human rights lawyer who came to politics as a late career change with no very clear idea of what he wanted to achieve. He seems to have imagined that there would be someone in Number 10 to tell him what to do, and has never quite recovered from the shock of realising that he is responsible.
Starmer had it too easy in Opposition. The last government was so unpopular, especially when the lockdown bills started coming in, that the Opposition could hardly fail to land punches. A frustrated electorate projected its hopes onto Starmer without looking too closely at him and, when the time came, gave him a colossal majority.
Perhaps, in the circumstances, we can forgive the PM for believing that he was a better human being than his Conservative predecessors, that he would be virtuous where they had been wicked, that governing would be easy.
After all, how hard could it be if those Tory tossers had managed it for 14 years?
Labour would be kinder, more generous, more internationalist, but also more competent. It would give lots of money to doctors and people who chose to go onto benefits and families claiming child benefit and Mauritian politicians and Eurocrats. Yet at the same time it would, as Starmer and Rachel Reeves kept repeating nasally and tautologically, “make growth our number one priority”.