Poor Keir Starmer is at the mercy of events much bigger than he is capable of being

Ayear ago today, Sir Keir Starmer became leader of the Labour Party. The poor chap’s timing could hardly have been worse. Shops and schools had just been closed, the PM and his Health Secretary had gone down with Covid and the Chancellor was conjuring vast quantities of cash into existence for a lockdown which, though it was notionally due to expire after three weeks, was widely expected to last longer – Dr Jenny Harries, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, had even suggested that it might be six months before everything was back to normal.

With all eyes on Downing Street, no one was paying attention to Labour. A new Opposition leader normally gets a month or two to make an impression, but Jeremy Corbyn’s successor was plainly going to be denied that opportunity. A couple of days before the result, I wrote a column on this page likening Sir Keir’s predicament to that faced by Iain Duncan Smith, who won his leadership ballot on the day that the Twin Towers were brought down in 2001. IDS had all manner of eyecatching initiatives planned for his first six weeks, but no one was watching. He never got a second chance.

Had it not been for the epidemic, Starmer’s tactics might have made sense: act like a grown-up; move on from Corbynism; expel some antiSemites; flaunt your patriotism; reconnect with Eurosceptic Northern voters. We might question whether these things would have been enough to bring the party back from its worst defeat since 1935; but they would surely have helped. Indeed, Labour almost immediately rose eight points in the polls simply by virtue of no longer being led by Corbyn.

But the coronavirus has utterly changed our politics, just as it has changed everything else. Not only in the sense that an emergency tends to make voters rally to the incumbent government. Not only in the sense that a collective threat makes people warier, more patriotic, more conservative. No, far more challenging, from Labour’s point of view, is the new economic situation.

A Tory government is spending vastly more than any previous administration. It is possible, albeit unpopular, to mount a criticism from the Right – to argue that the subsidies are excessive, that the debt will weigh us down for generations and that the furlough scheme is delaying the redistribution of jobs to more productive sectors. But it is almost impossible to make the converse arguments. A Labour opposition that demanded even higher spending would be seen as demented, and Starmer knows it. So, seeking to make a virtue of necessity, he backs both the lockdown and the associated economic policies, confining his opposition to sniping about procedural slip-ups.

Naturally, his ratings have sunk in consequence. Labour MPs, frustrated at his lack of salience, want more visible opposition. It is certainly true that Starmer’s personality – bland, pleasant, forgettable – is ill-suited to the times. But the worst possible response is to lurch into a populism that he cannot authentically carry off.

Starmer’s occasional attempts to act tough have been painful to watch. In the fraught days that followed Sarah Everard’s murder, for example, he declared: “Under the Tories, rape has effectively been decriminalised.” That claim is not just obnoxious and untrue. The bigger problem, at least politically, is that it is incredible. Does anyone seriously imagine that rapists are quaking in their shoes at the thought of a Starmer-led ministry? As a criminal barrister, Starmer used to argue against what he saw as draconian laws. You could agree or disagree with him, but he was plainly sincere. When, on the other hand, he poses as the champion of saloon-bar common sense against a namby-pamby government, he sounds like a nincompoop.

In different circumstances, Starmer might have made a useful leader, bridging the gap between his woke parliamentarians and the mass of blue-collar patriots who used to back Labour. But as things have worked out, through no fault of his, he finds himself looking on helplessly while bigger figures shape events. It’s hard not to feel sorry for him.