QUENTIN LETTS: Keir Starmer is barely meeting any real voters (2024)

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Word came late: Sir Keir Starmer would visit a pub in Basingstoke. Comrade of the Camden commissariat to descend on working-class Hampshire hostelry.

Political sketch writers might not be welcome but this had the potential to be a step in Labour's long march to victory. Chairman Starmer would be getting down and wet with the grateful masses!

Or perhaps not. The Boozingstoke venue was a chi-chi joint – the Gabardine – a cheese and charcuterie bar with a drinks list more about Egyptian mint tea than foaming ale.

The menu offered brie paninis and avocado on wholemeal toast. There was no one inside apart from media types, spin doctors, the co-owners, and Theo Paphitis off Dragon's Den, plus a couple of tame politics students.

Man walks into bar and doesn't buy a drink. Worse, politician walks into bar and doesn't let a drop pass his prim lips. Doesn't even pull a pint for the snappers.

There are two reasons politicians visit catering outlets. The first is to hear voters' concerns. The second is to be seen trying the same sort of food and drink that they consume. Ingesting something that the voters eat and drink has symbolic power.

It is, if you like, an act of communion. It says 'I have the same appetites as you'.

Sir Keir did none of that. Contact with the unwashed was almost non-existent, although a colleague did see him having a few words with two grannies in the street. Otherwise, this was a visit in a vacuum, as sterile as Elastoplast wound-healing ointment.

Before Basingstoke, Sir Keir dropped a clanger during an LBC phone-in show with Nick Ferrari.

'We've been really clear,' said the Labour leader, 'we won't raise taxes on working people.' This sounded good but Ferrari is a sharp old sausage-dog and he asked Sir Keir what he meant by 'working people'.

After a small computer re-set, the nasal knight began 'well, a working person...'

Ferrari: 'Simon Cowell?'

Sir Keir continued with his definition: '... is someone who works for a living.'

Ferrari: 'I've got that.'

Sir Keir: 'And uses our public services.' Ferrari: 'So it is Simon Cowell!' Sir Keir, suppressing the urge to throttle his interviewer: 'The person I have in mind when I say working people is people who earn their living, rely on public services and don't really have the ability to write a cheque when they get into trouble.'

No-one with a few quid put by for a rainy day, an ISA, a deposit account at the bank, Premium Bonds or a pension would count as a 'working person'. Everyone else will be in for a tax beating under Labour's plans.

Sir Keir had the air of a man coming to terms with his apparently imminent landslide. 'I'm enjoying it,' he said of this campaign in which he is touring the country not meeting people.

He complained that when he became Labour leader in 2020 he was unable to meet the voters owing to lockdown. He's hardly meeting many more now.

Michelle from Reigate, Surrey, was first caller. She ran a private school for children with special needs. How were they meant to cope with Labour's tax raid on independent education? 'I do take this really seriously,' claimed Sir Keir before refusing to change his policy.

Michelle quietly concluded that he was guilty of 'blind ignorance'. Sid from Lincolnshire was assured that apart from the non-doms tax, closing of private equity loopholes and more windfall taxes, 'none of our plans require tax rises'.

Ferrari was sceptical. What about council tax? Pension and property taxes? Sir Keir insisted everything could be paid for by economic growth. 'It's all been costed,' he gassed.

As evidence of public opinion he mentioned meeting a lesbian couple in Staffordshire. It's at least the sixth time he has mentioned them.

And there had been a woman in Southampton this week. Apart from that, he has been kept inside his canopic jar, protected from view like King Tutankhamun's intestines.

Keir StarmerLabour