To ordinary Britons - stay strong - the Starmer-Reeves dark days will pass - Kelvin MacKenzie

Had the public known that the very smart suits Starmer was wearing hadn’t been purchased by him that would have very swiftly blown up into a scandal. That scandal would have been very damaging at the ballot box.

The clothes for Victoria might more easily capture the headlines, but can you imagine every time Starmer gave a press conference to pour a bucket on Sunak’s spending policies the journalists would pop up unhelpfully and ask him where he got his suits from.

The drip, drip over six weeks of campaigning would have had an effect on polling. No doubt about it.

Oddly, it would probably not have helped the Tories who were all washed up, but more people would have looked round for a decent home for their vote. That could well have been Reform.

Still unanswered in my view is how a man in his sixties can spend that money on grey suits?

If you go to your local M&S store you can pay anything between £60 and £150 for suits. So, if you went for the top of the range you could buy 200+ suits for £32,000. It’s clear then he didn’t buy from M&S.

Where did he shop? I can only guess he went to Savile Row or the like and literally paid £3,000 a time for ten of them. Lord Alli probably had a mate. Why does a KC need an Alli to buy his clothes?

As a reasonably successful lawyer, he could be expected to earn anything upwards of £500,000. Hadn’t he put anything away for a rainy day? The wife worked. He didn’t have a huge family. Mortgage was on the verge of being paid off. Why didn’t he put his hand in his own pocket instead of Alli’s?

All this paints a very uncomfortable picture of the man we are lumbered with for next five years. When given the opportunity to mislead he will take it. I want to look smart but I don’t want to pay for the look. And I don’t want voters to know.

The reason that Starmer stories won’t have exploded is Leveson 2 which Starmer holds over the likes of The Sun or the Daily Mail. That would have introduced a press regulator, appointed by Labour. It would be a nightmare where anybody who didn’t like what was reported about them could complain.

The queue to be a publisher would rapidly become shorter than the queue to buy a pager in Beirut.

Starmer is clearly cunning but that will not save him from taking a series of polling defeats as the years go on. Already he is hugely unpopular and come the October 30 Budget will become more so.

There is no optimism. No sunlit uplands. Years of hard slog from a government which talks about the poor, but personally has no intention of joining them. Stay strong. This too will pass.