How safety first Starmer can beat Boris

Even before the embargo was lifted on Keir Starmer’s much-trailed and super-long Fabian pamphlet, The Road Ahead, commentators and critics were already putting the boot in. By writing his 12,000 words or so, all the Labour leader had seemingly achieved was the creation of a consensus, one stretching from the Spectator to the Guardian, that all he had painfully gestated was a cliché-ridden disaster, groaning with platitudes stolen from focus groups. The best thing that was said about it was that the pamphlet was so long and so turgid, hardly anybody would read it.

How many ideas a party leader requires to be effective, and from where they should come, is a matter of debate – but how many words they need to communicate them is not. For Boris Johnson ‘Get Brexit Done’ was apparently enough to secure an 80-seat majority in 2019. Glib though Johnson might have been, the chorus greeting Starmer’s pamphlet went, but at least people knew what he stood for.