Who Will Voters Trust More, The Straight Man Or The Joker?

There goes Keir Starmer, copying Tony Blair again. “The jokes are all very well but they’re going to wear thin when people are hit in their wallet,” Starmer told Robert Peston after Boris Johnson turned the Conservative Party conference into a four-day extended play version of his own stand-up comedy routine.

- John Rentoul

Other cabinet ministers were relegated to delivering speeches in a pen in a corner of the exhibition hall, screened off so that the chatter of the cafe area could be heard but not seen, while the prime minister gave media interviews that took all the headlines.

The Boris Johnson Festival culminated in the big speech in the big hall from the Sun King himself. It was a comic feat of strength, delivered at speed, starting with a line about sending Jeremy Corbyn, the “corduroyed communist cosmonaut”, into orbit at the last election.

Apart from a line about “the present stresses and strains”, which “are mainly a function of growth and economic revival”, the speech seemed far removed from the realities outside the security cordon, of shortages, rising costs, a cut in universal credit and impending tax increases. But it was interesting how Starmer chose to respond to it, echoing Blair, who said in his memoir that he gave careful thought to how to attack each of his Conservative opponents, defining William Hague as “better at jokes than judgement”.

Blair explained that he kept his attacks low key, because they were more likely to stick than “calling your opponent a liar, or a fraud, or a villain or a hypocrite” and “the middle-ground floating voter kind of shrugs their shoulders at those claims”.