Last year, when Rishi Sunak sauntered into Downing Street, he promised an era of stability and sensible policies in the wake of an unprecedented period of political and economic turmoil at the hands of his two most immediate, extremely eccentric predecessors, the blond buffoon and the crazy laissez-faire lady.

At the same time, on his surprise return from the political wilderness (having recently been fired by Boris Johnson and then spurned by Liz Truss), senior Cabinet member Michael Gove had gone rather further, announcing that he was part of a team determined to make the business of government boring again.

At that point, most British voters would probably have been happy to have got precisely that.

This also seems to have been a message that the Leader of His Majesty’s Opposition took very much to heart.

Sir Keir Starmer has positioned himself as the undisputed master of being boring. His leadership style represents a triumph of tedium. He manages to combine mildness with dullness in a way that would make even the gentle Tom Hanks in one of his blandest everyman roles punch the wall with envy. He has all the public charisma of Forrest Gump.

Mr. Starmer took over as Labour leader in 2020, following his party’s most disastrous election defeat in decades. Although, as one of his predecessor’s most loyal lieutenants, many of his supporters had initially expected a certain degree of left-wing continuity under Sir Keir’s stewardship, it soon became clear that he was determined to regain the political center ground which Labour had so successfully occupied in the early years of the partnership between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, a quarter of a century ago.

Blair had swept to power in 1997 with a landslide victory (the first of three wins) based in part upon the extraordinary unpopularity of an entrenched Conservative administration that had lost its way in a maelstrom of sleaze and incompetence after eighteen years in power. Keir Starmer has inherited a remarkably similar scenario.

Mr. Blair had also managed to articulate a clear, simple, progressive agenda, which crucially boiled down to a set of realistically deliverable and generally desirable points, in the form of five key pledges.

Blair had promised to cut primary school class sizes and public healthcare waiting lists, to fast-track punishments for young offenders, and to create more employment opportunities for any young people who remained at liberty, and to do so without raising income tax or interest rates.

Or as he’d put it in a pair of catchy soundbites, he’d be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime, and prioritize education, education, and education. And hospitals too. (While, of course, safeguarding the disposable incomes of the middle class.)

Much of this was Gordon Brown’s master plan, but the dour Chancellor had found, in Blair, the smoothest frontman he could ever have wanted to sell his vision for Britain.

When, a decade later, Blair left Brown in charge, it became painfully obvious that, despite his formidable intelligence and moral rectitude, the unsmiling Scotsman lacked the charisma needed to keep the electorate – and the tabloid press – onboard.

In 2001, Blair’s second election campaign had again focused on five key messages – although this time these pledges were rather less concrete in their detail – offering support for children and families, pensioners, public services, job-seekers, and businesses. That vagueness at least had the advantage of having pretty much everyone in the country covered.

Fourteen years later, Gordon Brown’s successor Ed Miliband had attempted to outdo Blair’s strategy by pushing Labour’s election pledge card up to a list of six, albeit ones that remained typically anodyne.

Miliband promised to make improvements to the economy, living standards, healthcare, immigration controls, youth opportunities, and the housing sector. Once more, there was something for everyone: from the xenophobic right, through working families and young people, to businesses and any folks who might ever happen to get sick or want a roof over their heads.

Depending on your perspective, this policy platform encompassed both the terminally uninteresting and the blindingly obvious. He might nevertheless have gotten away with it if he hadn’t decided to engrave his half-a-dozen pledges on a 2.6-meter-tall slab of stone.

As it was, this profoundly misjudged publicity stunt was met with general ridicule. It didn’t help that one of the senior people in Mr. Miliband’s campaign team told the BBC that the fact that he’d chosen to carve his promises in stone didn’t mean that he wasn’t going “to break them or anything like thatز"

The ‘EdStone’ (as it soon became known) may have been intended to carry the moral weight of the tablets onto which the Ten Commandments had been carved, but it ended up marking the demise and interment of Mr. Miliband’s hopes of ever reaching the highest office in the land.

However, Ed Miliband had a much bigger problem than just that large flat lump of rock. That problem was his personality – or, rather, the public perception that he didn’t have one.

Like Gordon Brown, he exhibited all the charisma of a brown paper bag filled with damp seaweed and stale prawn cocktail crisps.

Keir Starmer’s problem is very similar. The delivery of his speeches is so halting and poorly paced that there must be members of his top team feeling nostalgic for the day that Ed Miliband decided to perform his keynote conference address from memory and forgot to mention his economic strategy or his specific plans to address the urgent issue of the UK’s fiscal deficit.

Indeed, such is the trilling nasality of Sir Keir’s oratory that he makes adenoidal Ed sound like a man able to muster the deep, resonant tones of Luciano Pavarotti, James Earl Jones, or Orson Welles.

Related News

News from Nowhere: You Turn If You Want To

News from Nowhere: The death of trust

At the start of January, the current Tory premier Rishi Sunak had taken a leaf out of Tony and Gordon’s classic playbook when he unveiled the five core goals of his government for 2023. He undertook to fix the health service, boost the economy, and reduce interest rates, immigration, and inflation.

The last of these (the thing that everyone most wants) looks simultaneously easy and impossible. After all, there isn’t much he can actually do to make it happen. Common sense suggests that if he just sits there and does nothing (at least nothing like the things that Liz Truss tried), the exponential hikes in the cost of living witnessed over recent months will eventually have to level off.

Coming rather late to the party – but not fashionably so – Sir Keir published his own five pledges toward the end of last month. He’s promised to make Britain a green energy superpower (rehashing a plan launched as the centerpiece of his last conference speech), to improve healthcare and education (obviously enough), and to reform the justice system – which feels like standard fare from a former Director of Public Prosecutions but hardly appears designed to set the public imagination alight.

He also pledged to secure for the United Kingdom the highest level of sustainable economic growth among the G7 group of the planet’s wealthiest nations.

That at least seemed somewhat ambitious – especially given that the IMF has projected that the UK will this year see the worst economic performance of any of the richer countries in the world.

The notion that the UK could be about to experience a GDP spurt to overtake its closest competitors might seem as exciting and unlikely as the plot of the new Mission: Impossible film. It’s clearly been calculated to energize British voters, party members, and perhaps even the soporific Labour leader himself.

It would be more convincing however if Sir Keir didn’t always sound like he’s chewing on a bee. He’s about as dynamic as a comatose sloth. He has the energy levels of a battery-powered robot that’s been left running between charges for far too long.

Devoid of character or inflection, his delivery recalls the deadly whirr of an oncoming drone, but here its deadliness is encapsulated only in how deadly dull it is.

He’s always so determined to avoid provoking any controversy or causing any offense that it usually feels like he’s not said anything at all.

We’ve heard it all before. He’s as anonymous as an autonomous collective of digital anarchists. He’s as recognizable as Banksy. He blends into the background better than a tin of beige emulsion paint. He stands out from the crowd like a man in a red football shirt watching a match at Liverpool’s Anfield ground.

It’s like he’s in one of those TV interviews where they disguise the subject’s identity by showing them in silhouettes and giving them a funny voice.

He's the invisible man, the man who wasn’t there. A man with all the public speaking skills of Mr. Bean.

An empty taxi, as they say, pulled up outside the parliament. Keir Starmer got out.

He looks like New Labour lite, a budget version of Tony Blair. (Except of course in terms of his well-deserved reputation for honesty and integrity, and the relatively low probability that he’ll try to bomb Baghdad.)

Indeed, his enemies on the left of his own party have condemned his set of five pledges as “vapid” Blairite spin.

But Mr. Starmer’s real problem in the eyes of a jaded electorate isn’t that he sounds too much like the treacherous Tony Blair. In an age in which casual voters seem so easily swayed by personality politics, Sir Keir’s s true tragedy is – so very tragically – that he doesn’t sound quite enough like him.

Last week, Keir Starmer announced that he intended to appoint as his new chief of staff the senior civil servant who’d led the highly critical inquiry into the breaches of Covid-19 lockdown rules that had taken place in Boris Johnson’s own offices.

It would be hard to imagine anything more politically tone-deaf. It was a mind-numbingly foolish own goal. It gave the Tories all the ammunition they needed to argue that, as the Daily Mail’s front page trumpeted, the whole “Partygate probe” had merely been a “Labour plot”.

Given that Sir Keir’s greatest electoral advantage has lain in the governing party’s reputation for dishonesty and sleaze, this appeared to be a great way to let the Conservatives off the hook and to call into question his own moral probity.

It makes Ed Miliband’s slab of stone look like the Gettysburg Address.

He might as well have shot himself in the head.

He might as well have scratched the message “please don’t vote for me” onto a brick, signed it, and thrown it through the front window of a home of undecided voters… then rang their bell and asked for his brick back so he could do the same thing to the people next door. And repeated that tactic till he’d covered every household in the land.