Time will tell whether Starmer’s pledges on security and borders will be kept, analysis by Katherine Forster

But yesterday in Lancing, West Sussex, Starmer tried to claim "security" for Labour too.

In his first major speech of the General Election campaign, he told a packed room at Lancing Parish Hall: "The very foundation of any good government is economic security, border security, national security.

"Make no mistake - if the British people give us the opportunity to serve, then this is their core test. It is always their core test. The definition of service. Can you protect this country?

"I haven’t worked for four years on this, just to stop now. This is the foundation, the bedrock that our manifesto and our first steps, will be built upon.’

It was a personal speech, acknowledging many voters are not yet sold on Labour, or him.

He spoke of growing up on the South Coast, his parents at times having to make choices about which bill not to pay, when they couldn’t afford to shell out for everything. He said it was the phone bill which went unpaid.

During a cost of living crisis with millions struggling to make ends meet, this sends the message that he’s been there, he gets it.

And to stress that, though he’s a "Sir", he comes from working-class roots.

And so to security. I asked him for GB News in our one-to-one interview yesterday afternoon if he could be trusted.

After all, this is a man who served under Jeremy Corbyn for years, and twice campaigned to make him Prime Minister.

And let’s face it, it wasn’t just Boris Johnson’s charisma and a desire to "Get Brexit Done" that led to the Tories’ 80 seat majority back in 2019.

It was also, for many, a genuine fear of what a Corbyn government could mean for our national security.

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He told me: "We have changed this Labour Party. The Labour Party now is unrecognisable from the party of 2019.

"And I did that for a reason, because I thought that when we got rejected as badly as we did in 2019, you don’t look to the voters and say what on earth were you doing? You look to yourself, you look to your party and we have changed this party fundamentally."

I pressed him on the issue of the channel migrant crisis, as numbers this year exceed 10,000, a new record for this point in the year.

He said: "The government has lost control of the borders. We absolutely have to stop the boats. That will be a priority."

Central to Labour’s plan is going after the gangs: "I was Chief Prosecutor for five years, I worked on operations to take down terrorist gangs.

"I will never ever accept that the only gangs we can’t take down apparently, are the vile gangs that are running this trade putting people in boats across the water."

The government says its Small Boats Operational Command is already pretty much doing what Starmer claims his Border Security Command will do.

When I put this to him he said: "There are gaps everywhere. What I want to do is bring together all of the national crime agency, the prosecutors, the police, MI5 to do the work together to analyse with other countries and put in place an effective operation.

"That isn’t happening at the moment, we can see it isn’t happening by the numbers that are arriving."

He is scathing of Sunak’s Rwanda plan: "I don’t think the Prime Minister ever thought that would work. That’s what he thought in the first place.

"He caved into his party, he spent £600million and now he has called an election before it can be tested."

But though Labour have long written off the Rwanda plan as "a gimmick", across Europe EU countries from Denmark to Austria and Greece are now considering the use of safe third countries.

And last week in Vienna, the Austrian Chancellor hailed Sunak as "a pioneer".

I asked Starmer about this and he spoke of how asylum claims have successfully been processed "upstream" in Afghanistan and Ukraine.

That, I said, is very different to what many EU countries are now contemplating, and would he consider similar? I didn’t get an answer either way.

So time will tell whether Starmer’s pledges on security, and border security in particular, will be kept.

Meanwhile, I got chatting to three GB News voters in a cafe on the seafront in Worthing. They were fed up.

Sick of "politicians making all these promises and then giving us diddly squat".

They were sick of the Tories. And on Labour, thought they "can’t be any worse". They are far from alone.