How can Boris Johnson nullify the threat of Keir Starmer?

Keir Starmer’s bid to present himself as a serious leader for difficult times presents a problem for Boris Johnson, whose popularity continues to fall amid the various crises currently facing the nation. What is he to do? Sean O’Grady considers his options

Johnson has consistently tried to portray Starmer as a ‘continuation Corbyn’ (Getty)

After what was a mostly successful conference for the Labour leader, what now should Boris Johnson do about Sir Keir Starmer? It looks like Starmer is reasonably secure in his post, having engineered a couple of vital rule changes that make it more difficult to challenge him or dislodge his loyalist MPs. The leader of the opposition is here to stay, in other words, and he has derided the prime minister not as a “nasty man” but as a “trivial man”, a one-trick trickster. Now the prime minister will have to find a way of dealing with him. He has a few options.

First, he can pretend that the Labour Party is still led by Jeremy Corbyn, and treat Starmer as his heir. This, indeed, has been the prime minister’s approach for the past 18 months or so. At every opportunity Johnson reminds Starmer and anyone else who’s listening that he, Starmer, loyally served in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, helped to frame and endorsed the 2017 and 2019 Labour election manifestos, and simply sat through the waves of antisemitism and madness that scarred Labour politics in recent years.

In this worldview, Starmer is in fact a kind of continuation Corbyn, a secret agent who publicly renounces Corbynism but is just as set on using his high tax, high borrowing, high spending programme and enthusiasm for nationalisation. As the struggles at Labour conference highlight, this is not an entirely convincing case. Perhaps it would be better for Johnson not to exaggerate for comic effect, as he tends to, but just stick to attacking the various tax hikes and socialistic measures Starmer has in fact endorsed. It would sound a bit more realistic.