Keir Starmer’s political position is stronger than people would have expected a few months ago. The improvement in Labour’s poll position is giving him more personal authority within the party, allowing him to move on from the Corbyn era faster than expected. ‘The Labour party has the smell of power in its nostrils now and that’s enough to anaesthetise about 90 per cent of them’, one Johnson confidant fretted to me recently. As I say in the Times today, one particular benefit of this for him is that it allows him to sidestep Tory attempts to drag him into culture war skirmishes.
One reason why culture war attacks bounce off Keir Starmer is that he passes the Mary Cameron test. Back in February 2016 at a particularly bad-tempered PMQs, David Cameron told Jeremy Corbyn that his mother would tell the Labour leader to ‘put on a proper suit, do up your tie, and sing the national anthem’.
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