Keir Starmer is not so much asking for your vote in May as begging for it

The Labour launch had the sensation not so much that of being led into battle by some fearless warlord, but of being bothered late at night, on a train, by a man who just wants 50p for a cup of tea

Sir Keir Starmer launches Labour’s campaign for the local and mayoral elections yesterday (PA)

It requires a certain amount of determination to believe that Keir Starmer was once the UK’s most important prosecuting barrister. I happen to have been in a few courtrooms, over the years, seeing leading prosecuting barristers at work. Gerrie Nel, for example, the barrister who prosecuted Oscar Pistorius, is nicknamed in South African legal circles “The Rottweiler” – and for good reason.

By the end of Pistorius’s lengthy cross examination, he had been reduced to a kind of human wreckage. His testimony had been not so much interrogated as brutalised; his brittle ego and fragile emotions laid waste upon.

This is the standard modus operandi of the criminal prosecutor. It is a skillset that should have significant crossover for politicians, too. Prosecutors tend to have to convince randomly selected members of a jury. Politicians have to convince voters, who are just the same.

It is an incontrovertible fact that some of the country’s most violent, most terrifying people have been sent directly to jail without passing go by Keir Starmer.  And yet, to see him at work, it is very hard to close one’s eyes and imagine him even being able to tell his own children it’s time they went to bed.

On Thursday morning, he launched Labour’s campaign for the local election. There was no one there. Just Keir, a blank backdrop and the usual cluster of a few meaningless aspirational words. But the sensation was not so much that of being led into battle by some fearless warlord, rather of being bothered late at night on a train by a man who just wants 50p for a cup of tea.

“We mustn’t let the extraordinary success of the vaccine rollout blind us to what happened before,” he said. “The Conservatives were too slow to get medicines to the front line, and too slow to sack Dominic Cummings when he broke the rules.”

These were the words that left his lips, but the ones that went into my ears were more approximately thus:

“Pllleeaaaaaaaase. I know everything’s much better now but try not to think about that. You have to think about how bad it was before. It was terrible before, wasn’t it? Don’t worry about now. Worry about then.”

This, unfortunately, is probably not how one goes about winning elections. Votes tend not to be lent with a weary resignation, like a tenner to an unreliable friend.

Last year, when everything was going unimaginably wrong, it was thrilling to watch Prime Minister’s Questions, as Starmer found it all too easy to eviscerate Boris Johnson over an unimaginably long list of catastrophic failures. But it does feel like the mood of the nation is far more excited about vaccinations than it ever was distraught about catastrophic numbers of deaths.

This, for Starmer, is unfortunate. And it will go on being unfortunate for him that the nations’ chief rage stokers, principally the right-wing newspapers, are never going to help him out.

A couple of days ago, William Hague wrote a fascinating column about how Keir Starmer’s problems could very easily be as serious as his own were, when he led the Tories in 1997. Everything he might seek to promise to do has already been promised by a Conservative government that has very right-wing Brexiteers in its thrall; and a whole load of very centre-left, very spendy economic policies to offer the rest.

Hague is certainly right. But Keir Starmer does have time on his side. Currently, both men might be offering more or less the same thing. But in three and a half years’ time, only one can be held accountable for having not delivered them.

He doesn’t have as much time on his side as he used to, however. He’s been Labour leader for almost a year now. It’s very common, over a long cycle of opposition, to watch a leader grow into the televisual and oratorical aspects of their new role. Starmer will surely do the same. But, with all the usual caveats about the extraordinary circumstances of the last twelve months, the rate of growth has been disappointing. If you’d bought him from a garden centre, you probably wouldn’t go there again.

As things stand, the jury is struggling to follow the case. Its mind is wandering. There is still plenty of time to go, but really not much time left to get going.