Keir Starmer has deliberately pursued a strategy of revealing as little as possible, boasting today that his manifesto didn’t contain any surprises. In between his verbal tic about his father being a toolmaker, Starmer has been least at ease in the TV debates, and it was in the first of these that he said more than he probably intended to. Asked by ITV’s Julie Etchingham whether he had any advice for ‘Gareth on his way to Berlin [for the Euros]’ about leadership, Starmer replied:
‘You need a strategy for winning. So it depends on your opponent and what the issue is.’
It isn’t telling us what it is going to do in detail because that would scare the horses
The Labour leader is of course right. You need to win first. He seemed to be thinking about the Jeremy Corbyn years, when plenty of thought was given to the ends and none to the means. Corbyn even made an analogy at his party conference about a football team which had lots of supporters, without mentioning whether or not they actually won any games.
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