Keir Starmer, conservative prime minister?

According to Keir Starmer’s critics, the Prime Minister has spent his first six months in office re-enacting Henry VIII’s plunder of the monasteries, Stalin’s liquidation of the kulaks and Herod’s slaughter of the firstborn. But while there may be good grounds to oppose the imposition of VAT on private school fees, the extension of inheritance tax to farmland and means testing of pensioners’ winter fuel allowance, revolutionary acts of Marxist Leninism they are not. The hyperbolic reporting of these modest adjustments to a few taxes and benefits affecting the better off has hidden a more surprising truth about the UK’s first Labour government for fourteen years: the soft left human rights lawyer from north London is proving to be a distinctly conservative Prime Minister.

Starmer’s first big test came in July with the riots that followed the heinous murder of young children at a dance class in Southport. His response was as tough as anything Michael Howard might have imposed when Home Secretary.