Keir Starmer’s manifesto will disappoint Tory spin doctors

Keir Starmer and the Labour party today launched a manifesto that’s good enough to win this election and presented it in a commensurate manner. If that comes across as damning with faint praise then this is what your author intended. After all, there was – as Beth Rigby of Sky News noted in her question to Starmer – no new policy and no discernible retail offer for voters in the entire manifesto.

Starmer made a virtue of that, stressing that all Labour’s ambitions to provide better public services and build a fairer society depended on economic growth picking up to provide the funds to make them happen. He even had his no doubt carefully chosen audience dashing to don the hair shirts, winning strong applause from it as he told Rigby: ‘It’s not about pulling rabbits out of the hat. I am a candidate to be prime minister, not a candidate to run the circus.’

And Starmer – very much performing at the ceiling of his abilities – even managed a competent ad lib when responding to a heckler by declaring ‘we gave up being a party of protest five years ago, we want to be a party of power’.