How Starmer can beat Boris

How should Keir Starmer deal with a problem like Boris Johnson? Despite the Prime Minister’s mistakes in the handling of the pandemic – and a string of embarrassing stories about his private life and finances – Boris seems unassailable. Johnson is seen as best suited to be Prime Minister by 40 per cent of voters compared to just 23 per cent for Starmer; most surveys give the Tories a double digit lead over Labour.

Party leaders receive much unsolicited and often useless advice. Starmer is not alone in that. Over the years, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War has been scoured for helpful aphorisms, while Machiavelli’s The Prince is still seen as a repository of sage advice. But relevance – and obscurity – are often a problem with such sources. One of Machiavelli’s suggestions, that a leader should ‘be a fox to discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves’, might make sense to a sixteenth century Florentine duke but try explaining it to Nick Clegg.

So Starmer might look closer to home for more useful lessons – and particularly to 1945 when Labour achieved one of its rare election victories.

Before the 1945 campaign began, most pundits confidently predicted the return of a majority Conservative government led by Winston Churchill, the man many credited with playing a critical role in defeating Germany.