Is Keir Starmer a populist?

No one thinks of the careful, polite Keir Starmer as a populist hero. But his intervention in the fuel crisis is a classic example of a barnstorming populist intervention that pushes aside complexity and forces a complacent elite to think again.

The fuel cap must be frozen at today’s level until March 2023, Labour says. Everyone’s fuel cap, that is, without exception. No clever pointy-headed schemes to target help at this group of energy consumers but not at that. Just a big, bold, simple policy that Labour politicians can explain in a sentence.

Biff, Bash, Boff, the Starmster gets it sorted.

Labour believes Liz Truss has walked into a trap of her own making. ‘She’s concentrated on tax cuts, the priority of Tory members, not on the cost of living, the priorities of the electorate,’ one of Starmer’s aides said.

So she has, and appealed to her own right-wing prejudices as well. But the mistakes of the presumptive leader of the Tory party do not on the face of it justify Labour calling for an extraordinarily expensive subsidy for every household in the country, including households that do not need it.