Sir Keir Starmer gets a lot of grief for being inauthentic. Never has this been truer than in photos of him in the last 10 days since the local elections, where he has had to do his best to look buoyant, vital and workmanlike. He must be so miserable underneath it all.
He has been clear he won’t be “walking away” from Downing Street any time soon (which is true in at least one respect – prime ministers depart by car), not unless Labour MPs can organise themselves to follow due process to oust him. Putting Starmer’s obsession with process to one side (it is a regular theme), there is something admirable about his ability to cling on with a faux smile. A bit like Tom Cruise holding onto a plane mid-takeoff in Mission: Impossible. I suspect they use the same implacable hair product too.
