Yet the Prime Minister suffers from a sort of political split personality syndrome: private Starmer and public Starmer are two very different people. One is likeable, warm, down to earth, engaging, thoughtful; the other is wooden, unemotive, uninspiring.
Starmer’s love of the sport is lifelong and real. Unlike with previous occupants of No 10, it is not a tedious facade to make him look like he understands normal people. You won’t find Starmer doing a David Cameron and forgetting which football team he is supposed to support, nor participating in a football match as if it is a game of public school rugger, a la Boris Johnson.
Yet put him in front of a microphone and all that disappears. A man who could easily hold his own in a debate about the benefits of the 4-2-3-1 formation or the role of modern wing-backs suddenly starts talking as if he is a walking AI. His bland statements about Sunday’s Euros final could have come from pretty much any other politician in living memory. Here was a chance for the Prime Minister to connect with voters on a topic that genuinely exercises him; to share his joy with a nation equally thrilled by the Lionesses’ latest successes. He could not find a way to do it.
Boris Johnson during the Euro 2020 semi-final at Wembley (Photo: Tom Jenkins/Getty)But politics is more about emotion than it is about reason; of course, it helps if voters like what a politician is saying, but it helps a lot more if they like the person saying it. And that is where Starmer struggles. The Prime Minister is not immediately likable in public because he struggles to convey who he really is.
I have long thought that class plays a big role here. Curiously, what unites many of the politicians who struggle most to convince voters of their humanness is just how normal they really are.
Most politicians from more humble backgrounds, I suspect, never feel fully at ease in the gilded dining rooms of Westminster, attending lavish banquets with world leaders or dressing up in white tie to address halls of bankers. The only way to deal with a world so alien to the one they previously inhabited is, to an extent, to act, to perform – to play the part of what you think a Prime Minister or a Chancellor or a Cabinet minister should be.
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I wonder if some of this unconscious unease affects Starmer, a working-class boy still relatively new to the world of politics, who now finds himself hobnobbing with presidents. Those who have been with him since the early days of his journey to Downing Street describe a man who was initially hesitant, trepidatious, and guarded about his long-held ambition to climb to the very top of the political pole. Nobody says that about David Cameron or Boris Johnson. Political power was something that Starmer was determined to work hard to secure, not something he had always believed was his anointed destiny.
The Prime Minister is openly hostile to the idea of emotional self-reflection, but if he is to turn his dire poll ratings around, a bit more introspection might be exactly what he needs. Getting properly excited about the Lionesses’ stunning success is as good a place as any to start.
Ben Kentish presents his LBC show from Monday to Friday at 10pm, and is a former Westminster editor
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