Keir Starmer is an excellent Labour leader, which is why he’ll never be PM

We’ve all been very impressed, haven’t we, by Sir Keir Starmer’s performances at Prime Minister’s Questions? His calm, precise and forensic dismantling of Boris Johnson has drawn praise from all quarters. Quite right too. An effective Leader of the Opposition is vital to any democracy and at last, we seem to have one. An eminent QC with the courage to ask the tough questions and put our blustering PM on the rack.

There are, inevitably, some petty quibblers who aren’t quite so Starmerstruck. They feel that the hindsight-fuelled bullying of a man still recovering from a near-death experience, and the castigating of a government forced to face horrendous economic and societal problems, weren’t particularly courageous. They’d have liked Sir Keir to have shown a bit more courage last year to conquer and crush the anti-Semitism within his own party. They were disappointed at the way he meekly kept his head down, his nose clean and his job safe.