I’VE never been able to work out whether being “all things to all men” is a compliment or not. It can be both, I suppose. You might use the phrase for that increasingly rare phenomenon – a politician with the common touch who actually enjoys other people, blessed with the ability to talk to diverse audiences without giving the impression that they’re a visiting Martian wearing a failing human suit and at risk of spraying extraterrestrial coolant into the crowd.

Nobody, I think, would be at risk of mistaking Sir Keir Starmer for this kind of easy character. He doesn’t even have superficial charm. But his political career demonstrates a keen awareness of the importance of telling the audience in front of you what you think it wants to hear, even if that message is wildly at odds with what you might have said a couple of days, weeks, months or years earlier. For fans, I suppose you might describe this as evidence of Starmer’s strategic flexibility. To critics, it looks like mendacity. They probably amount to the same thing.

These days, savvy modern political analysis tends to assume people-pleasing ambiguity is what cunning political operators should do, particularly before elections. When everyone hates you a few months later, you can wisely look back and observe “you campaign in poetry and govern in prose”. By then, everyone will have forgotten how prosaic your campaign really was.

Roll out a platform of policies before an election, and you are guaranteed to get yourself mired in the details, some of which are likely to be less than fully worked through. Is this scheme fully costed? Are the costings credible? Have you fully thought through the eligibility requirements?

If you commit to a particular platform, it’s inevitable that your policies will both generate and alienate elements of your support. Almost all policy choices create winners and losers, and the losers may not be inclined to vote for you. Imagine Labour had included winter fuel cuts or Pip clawbacks and cuts in their manifesto. The reaction, I imagine, would have been interesting.

And thus the conventional political wisdom says – don’t give your enemies a large target. Be vague. Don’t commit.

As far as possible, don’t specify.........

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