Keir Starmer has no conviction — here’s why that’s good for conservatives

In a rare turn of events Sir Keir Starmer is shaping up to be one of the best Conservative Prime Ministers we’ve had for ages. Lefty members of the man’s party must be foaming at the mouth at the millionaire peer’s new-found grasp, and indeed relishing, of old-fashioned Tory values. Values which you would have thought people like and Liz Truss might have kept slightly closer to their hearts if they had really wanted to win over voters.

Just look at what the last few days of the blue-Labour knight has given us: Promises for vastly increased spending on defence; axing of the foreign aid budget; warnings of swingeing cuts to benefits (including disability); shipping off almost 20,000 illegals back to their countries of origin and strong hints that attacks on wealth are now done. It’s the stuff of Tory wet dreams. And it continued at Prime Minister’s Questions where, for the fourth week running, the Prime Minister wiped the floor with poor Kemi Badenoch.

Indeed the Leader of the Opposition is starting to look like an irrelevance thanks to the haphazardness of her interrogation and her woefully poor briefing.

So yet again this week her timid, almost 6th form level performance, left Starmer looking every inch the international statesman in a different political league.

To be fair, against all expectations, he kind of is right now. The man is having a good war. or no , Europe came to London to thrash out endgame scenarios for and Starmer bossed it. And it’s happening again this weekend. Not in Brussels, not in Berlin, not even in Paris – London, with Starmer in charge.

What, you may be asking yourself, is going on?

Labour is simply out-Torying the right now. Even his opening gambit at PMQs was the PM channelling his inner Margaret Hilda as he said: “This week we introduced landmark legislation to get Britain building, paving the way to restoring the dream of home ownership for working people across the country.”

But in all honesty if that dream belonged to anyone it belonged to Mrs Thatcher… who now appears to be the spiritual mentor of the current PM. Indeed Keir reeled off a list of Tory MP’s – including Badenoch – who he accused of standing in the way of home building in the name of nimbyism. It was not a good look.

Yet again Starmer was given an easy ride by Kemi, whose questioning is just too flimsy, too loose and too ill-informed to do any serious damage. Time and time again it seemed she would launch a half-hearted broadside against the PM only for him to race to his feet to remind her the policy in question had been green-lit by the last Conservative government. Then we got bogged down in breakfast clubs and childcare, all of which should be backbencher fodder not Party Leader stuff.

Even her accusations about Labour’s budget possibly costing 300,000 jobs fell woefully flat because, I’m afraid, of Kemi’s style. She accused Starmer of going back on a promise not to allow council taxes to be raised (which is at least partly true) but he hit back with a list of Tory council after Tory council which his Government had stopped from hiking council taxes by insane amounts – 25% in one case.

That is good briefing, and Kemi’s people need to watch and learn.

Very quickly.

Elsewhere the embarrassingly obvious plant question of the week came from John Slinger (Lab Rugby) who asked if the fabulous PM was going to “fix the broken welfare system”?

This allowed Keir another stab at softening us, and the Party, up for swingeing cuts to the welfare budget which will be announced in a fortnight. Indeed Starmer’s pledge to “get those who can work back to work” could have been Iain Duncan Smith in his pomp. While Ian Burgon (Lab Leeds East) who was concerned Labour were hitting the poor was told “this isn’t a bottomless pit”. It was Norman Tebbit at his most unsympathetic.

And there’s the rub for Kemi and her party.

With a few ugly exceptions (the politics of envy private schools bill and the borderline insane up-coming workers’ rights legislation) Keir has nicked the ’ clothes. And because he is not driven by dogma – let’s be honest, he is a man who couldn’t find a political conviction with both hands – he is perfectly at ease pulling Tory levers.

How long the Left of the Party will put up with it before Labour has a civil war on its hands remains to be seen.

But, and I never thought I’d say this, I rather think we should see how this thing plays out…