What Starmer still lacks

Keir Starmer has spent the hours since his successful conference speech lapping up the praise from party members, frontbench colleagues and business. He had the air of a man who had hit his stride when he appeared in the broadcast studios this morning, ridiculing questions about whether he was a bit boring by saying ‘if I came on and said I’ve done a bungee jump, you wouldn’t say “oh great, now we’ve got the prime minister we need”.’ You could hear his eye-roll as he said ‘bungee jump’ into the Today programme microphone.

But his broadcast round also showed how much more work the Labour leader needs to do before he gets the ultimate pat on the back of winning an actual election. It’s not so much dealing with the Rupa Huqs of this world – he told broadcasters that what Huq had said yesterday about Kwasi Kwarteng being ‘superficially’ black was ‘racist’ and he was glad the party had taken such swift action.