Voices: It’s Starmer vs Sunak in the battle of the boring – but who will win?

Keir Starmer is, I am told, a good, decent, humble, committed man. He is profoundly patriotic and profoundly committed to public service. To those that know him well, that has been self-evident for a very long time.

It took a while for the Labour Party to realise what they’d got and even longer for the British public to fall into line too. It really wasn’t that long ago (little more than a year) that in the focus groups I run, participants would confuse Starmer with Jeremy Corbyn, dismiss him as boring or rubbish him as “yet another lawyer in a suit”.

I think we can now safely say that that has changed. Both the polling and the focus groups show that people are now much more enthusiastic about the leader of the opposition and much more willing to get behind the idea that a sensible, moderate man in a suit is just what the country needs just now.

This development will come as exactly no surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the s***show of British politics in the last few months and years. Towards the end of the Johnson mayhem and into the Truss episode, “boring” went from being Starmer’s Achilles heel to his secret weapon.

Opposition politicians were even heard to mutter that voters should be promised that a Labour government would get politics off the front pages.

But then along came Sunak. Parachuted in by the Conservative establishment to arrest the hemorrhaging of both credibility and electoral support, the new PM has clearly set himself the mission of being both serious and boring.

His refusal to smile when he arrived in Downing Street this week and the tone of the speech that followed screamed: “The grown ups are here. Don’t worry, we’ll fix everything. Now potter off and spend your autumn watching Professional Masterchef and the Qatar World Cup.”

In short, it looks like we’re about to witness the dullest face off in political history. Boring vs Boring-er.

All of which is kind of fine. Except for one thing, we don’t live in boring times. We live in frankly terrifying times. Readers won’t need remining about the cost of living crisis, the war in Ukraine and the imminent public sector cuts.

It doesn’t matter if you look and sound like a sensible high street accountant – if you’re ushering in a new age of austerity without an electoral mandate to do so, lots of people are, rightfully, are still going to be very, very cross about it.

In the coming days, and even weeks, voters might feel a general sense of relief that neither Truss nor Corbyn are trying to burn the national house down, but it won’t make it any better if they can’t afford to heat their homes, the trains have effectively stopped running, they can’t get a GP appointment, the teaching assistants in the local primary have all been laid off and every single shop on the local high street is boarded up.

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And so Starmer cannot rest on his laurels. The polls just now are great but “sensible and morally upstanding” will only get him so far. So too will attacking the billionaire occupant of Downing Street and his non-dom wife.

To be fair, Labour is beginning to articulate policies, and its green growth agenda looks like it could contain some really interesting ideas. But in areas where levelling up is so desperately needed, and elsewhere there are lots of potentially, and justifiably, angry voters, many of whom have been tempted by Nigal Farage’s snake oil before – and could be again.

Both parties (hopefully Labour more fully) will need to demonstrate that they have a plan and a vision to do something meaningful for these communities – else people there will either sit on their hands at the next election, or, worse, turn to alternative, radical, political voices.