What’s most tempting about a Labour government right now?

Policies will matter at the next election, of course, but a firm promise that politics can and will become boring again will be key, writes Marie Le Conte

Keir Starmer was mocked and criticised for being a bit boring and lacking passion, but it may well be the best thing about him (Getty Images)

I do not believe I am asking for very much. All I want – all I have ever wanted – is to be able to go on holiday for just under three days and for the four great offices of state to remain unchanged in that time. It shouldn’t be an unreasonable demand.

Still, I was in Luton airport on Friday, thinking about the lovely food I was going to eat and the warm sea I was going to swim in, and the chancellor got sacked. It was hard not to take it personally.

As I came back 48 hours later, I found a copy of Friday’s Metro on my tube seat, in which Kwasi Kwarteng bragged about the fact that he was not going anywhere. I sighed. At least, I thought afterwards, this is the job I chose for myself. I cannot imagine what it must be like to have to follow all this and not even get paid for it.

Ironically (given what ended up following) this is something that Boris Johnson always understood. “Vote for me and we’ll all have a jolly good time,” is what he’d say, but what he actually meant was: vote for me and you won’t have to care about me again (unless you really want to).

The Brexit vote was largely seen as a victory against the political elite, but the 2019 election was even more straightforward than that. When the Conservatives said “Get Brexit Done” three years ago, it wasn’t just a message to those who’d voted to leave. If anything, the slogan felt truncated. If published in full, it would have read “Get Brexit Done… So We Can All Finally Get Back To Our Lives”.

It was a good point; following the Scottish independence referendum, and the EU referendum, and the chaos and botched snap election that followed, Westminster’s grasp on the news felt inescapable. Promising to make the SW1 bubble a bubble again was an attractive prospect – and clearly it worked.

It seems odd, then, that few in the Conservative Party managed to learn from this. Choosing a radical ideologue like Liz Truss to lead them was always going to be a gamble in more ways than one. Even if her economic plan had worked in the medium term, it still would have required ample explaining and convincing.

The boring truth about having revolutionary ideas is that you have to work that much harder to get people on your side. There may be a world in which this is doable, but ours does not feel like the right one.

People are not only worried about their livelihoods, energy bills and everything else; they are also knackered, and desperate to tune out from political news. It is fair to say that Truss has, in the past six weeks, made herself quite hard to ignore.

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Perhaps it will change now that Jeremy Hunt has replaced Kwarteng as chancellor; one of the former health secretary’s qualities is that he is, broadly speaking, quite dull. Still, he cannot help the fact that his parliamentary party remains helmed by an eccentric, and is broadly engulfed in an everlasting civil war.

What should be worrying to the Conservatives is that one group of people definitely did learn the right lessons from 2019 – they just happen to be the Labour Party. Keir Starmer was mocked and criticised for being a bit boring and lacking passion, but it may well be the best thing about him.

Similarly, his shadow cabinet is serious and united but rarely exciting. It isn’t ideal for people who, like me, get paid to care and write about this stuff, but it should be music to voters’ ears. Policies will matter at the next election, of course, but a firm promise that politics can and will become boring again will be key.

It isn’t clear that the Conservatives can offer anything along those lines right now, or may be able to offer it in two years’ time. Really, they only have themselves to blame.