QUENTIN LETTS: What a stultifying speech that was... but Sir Keir is the only Tsar now, and he is tingling with self-satisfaction

Beware the lifelong bore seizing revenge. For years, as he bitterly knows, Sir Keir Starmer has been the office joke, the nasal proceduralist, a crashing nerd to avoid at the Christmas party. The droning regurgitator of one or two ‘amusing’ stories. ‘Have I told you my father was a tool-maker?’

Sir Keir of the perpetual frown, whose idea of grooviness was that jellied-up quiff. An aggressively dull potato. One to make E L Wisty seem like Ken Dodd.

Now he is about to be PM. Of that they have no doubt. There was an air of entitled swagger at Labour’s manifesto launch in Manchester, and not just among the party officials. You should have seen some of the grandees of the London media, veterans of the Blair years. Creamy superiority was smeared on their chops.

We blunt nibs were not permitted to mix with activists beforehand. Message control would not permit that.

Instead, we were shoved into an upper room in the 14-storey Co-Op headquarters. From this eyrie I saw the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, being talked to, closely, by Sir Keir’s chief of staff Sue Gray. She’s the one who made that supposedly neutral investigation of Boris Johnson when she was a civil servant.

Some 200 candidates and supporters were seated in the building’s atrium. Dress code for most of the men was dark suit and red tie, as in the New Labour years. One defying this trend was Andy Burnham, mayor of Manchester, more casual in the sort of designer knitwear favoured by daytime TV presenters. Mr Burnham is charming, easy-going, a magnet for eyeballs. He must look at that lumpen snorker Starmer and wail at life’s injustice.

Shortly before the event, began we were handed copies of the manifesto. A spin-doctor snapped that nothing must be tweeted until some given hour. Embargos usually apply to rivetingly newsy copy but there was nothing fresh here. You’d find more plot twists in the Highway Code. Detail was minimal. Their true tax-raising plans will be kept secret until after election day.

Thirty-three: the number of photographs of Sir Keir. We had Sir Keir in hi-viz, Sir Keir with Ed Miliband, Sir Keir apparently being given a basic maths lesson by Rachel Reeves. There was one of Sir Keir standing at an odd angle – suppository time, matron – by the cliffs of Dover. We got his signature twice, too.

Actress Imelda Staunton wrote a section. So did former chief scientific officer Sir Patrick Vallance, he who wanted longer, harder lockdown. His distaste for Boris and Co at the Covid Inquiry suddenly acquired an interesting perspective.

It was a little unfortunate that the manifesto promise on morality in government (‘Labour will end the chaos of sleaze’) appeared directly opposite a photograph of Sir K Snorer with Vaughan Gething, Labour’s first minister of Wales, currently himself in a sleazy pickle.

Warm-up speeches came from Angela Rayner, in cream shoulder-pads, and again from that poor chap with the terminal cancer. We also heard from the head of Iceland supermarkets, a pushy little suck-up who deplored ‘14 years of Tory chaos’ even though he, until a few months ago, wanted to be a Tory MP.

Sir Keir absorbed long applause before giving a stultifying 20-minute speech. Every anecdote was old. Almost every phrase felt stale. Not even a bold young heckler did much for the tempo.

During questions, someone mentioned Jeremy Corbyn. Starmer went suddenly acidic. Corbyn, he said, was not only not a Labour candidate, ‘he has been expelled from the party!’

The atrium did not love this reply. Only about half of them applauded. I looked at the Shadow Cabinet. Liz Kendall, Steve Reed and chief whip Sir Alan Campbell clapped. Most others, among them Emily Thornberry (a ringer these days for Boris Yeltsin c.1990), did not.

Not that Sir Keir will mind. He’s in charge now. He’s the Tsar, tingling with self-satisfaction.