SIR Keir Starmer could not have wrapped himself more in the England flag this week without actually dressing in chainmail, wearing a cross of St George as a cloak and popping a lit flare up his backside.
The Labour chief was lauded for managing to say happy Saint George’s Day in a glossy video without being lynched by his infamously snobbish colleagues.
Just don’t tell the whopping one in eight Labour voters who think the red and white standard is racist, though.
Starmer is in another one of his policy-light, big on the feels, “Frank Hope” phases.
Sources say he’s deliberately dressing like a trusty mid-table football manager who screams neither glory nor relegation, but a safe pair of hands.
Obviously Labour have a lot of work to do to convince normal people that they no longer sneer at patriotism and want to turn the Army into a peace corp.
Yet in sharp contrast, the Prime Minister had a rather different week.
While Starmer was all vibes, Rishi Sunak was actually pulling his finger out. At last!
After being battered by top brass and MPs alike, he finally got on board with hiking defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP.
Two long years after deriding Boris Johnson for announcing he would do so, reality seems to have kicked in — both to the threat to Britain and the threat to his own leadership at home.
Sunak’s rather good, if expensive, trip to Poland came fresh on defeating the hold-out Lords and an army of moaners on the Government’s flagship — and must- deliver — Rwanda deportation scheme.
And that came on the back of another manifesto commitment on keeping the benefits bill down, and a push on tackling mind-boggling levels of out-of-work Brits post-pandemic.
War-weary ministers and even some clucking and wavering backbenchers have been pleasantly surprised by Sunak’s shock and awe approach in the last few days.
Finally they can start to see the battle lines drawn for an election campaign, that some of the most senior figures in government whisper should come sooner rather than later.
If the PM is really confident of his Rwanda plan being wheels-up, then what better backdrop for the election campaign than the policy in action?
Just imagine one taking off the night of one of the TV debates — “will you ground the planes Sir Keir? Will you?”
The concept is popular, even if the price has made some voters wince a bit.
But Labour will be seeing the same focus group results No10 are — voters saying something must be done and a deterrence is needed.
Yet right now Starmer is only shouting “smash the gangs”, which is not a credible policy when that’s already been tried.
More politically savvy ministers feel the timing of this summer far outweighs autumn for the chance to make Starmer actually choose a position on the Channel crisis.
This week we’ve learnt more about Rishi Sunak and where he wants to go and how he wants another five years in power to look like.
To govern is to choose, as they say, and Sunak has finally come off the fence on defence and at least has something to say about getting slackers back to work.
In contrast, Starmer’s vague talk of a mission-led government — long on the rhetoric and short on any policy — is starting to look pretty woolly.
What are his answers on benefits, defence, immigration? We don’t really know yet.
All the polls say Starmer will be the next PM, but mostly by dint of not being the other team.
But there is still a sizeable chunk of the public who believes Starmer stands for nothing — and if he was forced to say what he really thinks on the biggest issues, they might not like what they hear.
“He is a blank page, a weathervane, a technocrat — and that’s the most dangerous thing of all,” one MP says.
“The longer you give Starmer before polling day, the longer you give him to work out the answers to awkward questions,” another tells me.
In his brilliant new Brexit book No Way Out, Tim Shipman, a fellow scribe at the Sunday Times, writes of Theresa May: “Those that succeed at politics know where they want to go strategically, how to get there tactically and have the necessary skills to execute their plans.
“Politicians that lack any one of these three struggle; those lacking two, fail.”
Plenty of people in Westminster believe Starmer is equally vulnerable to at least some of those weaknesses.
Sunak might be wise to put that to the test sooner rather than later.
DAME Karen Pierce, whose term as UK ambassador in Washington DC is up in early 2025, was very coy about her future.
Speaking to Never Mind The Ballots on Whitehall rumours she could become a future cabinet secretary, she diplomatically told me: “I love the public sector.
But at the moment, I’m concentrating on doing the best possible job I can here.”
What we call on the show . . . not a denial!
THERE are a lot of similarities between Steve Bannon and Dominic Cummings.
Neither suffers fools gladly, both were chief of staff in all but name to blond bombshell leaders, and both were forced out when they became the story rather than their respective principals, Trump and Boris.
Both are now looking at what the future of right-wing politics will be, with Cummings returning to his idea of a new “Start-Up Party” to rise from the ashes of a Tory routing at the election.
But his fellow svengali has a word of advice, telling The Sun’s Never Mind The Ballots: “It’s like the Republicans – don’t spend a lot of time trying to build third parties. Take over the apparatus that’s right in front of you.”
Bannon’s message? “I would tell my brothers and sisters in the United Kingdom, you can do this at the grassroots level . . . you need to put Great Britain first, the United Kingdom first, you need to put particularly your citizens first.
“What’s happened is London’s become the global city of the global elite.”
A quote that could easily come from one of Cummings’ rambling blogposts.
AS Britain moves toward banning fags, vaping and even cigars, across the pond things are going the other way.
Large swathes of the land of the free have de-criminalised weed – and boy, you can tell.
There’s an almost constant pong, 24 hours a day, whenever you walk in New York or Washington DC as people openly smoke joints walking down the streets.
Freedom isn’t odour-free.
