KEIR Starmer doesn’t have a favourite book. He doesn’t have a favourite poem. He hasn’t thought about whether he’s an extroverted or introverted person. He had, he claims, no childhood fears.

And perhaps most curiously, he tells Charlotte Edwardes in The Guardian this weekend that he doesn’t have a dreamlife either. Never has. His head hits the pillow after the long day is done, and his mind is just a blank colourless void till dawn.

As rhetoric goes, Sir Keir was never ­likely to channel Martin Luther King Jr – but “I don’t have a dream” is just that bit too much on the nose. Starmer doesn’t seem to be boasting here. He reports all this ­inexperience and incuriosity factually – like a man without imagination, who can’t imagine what an imagination would be ­useful for.

I wondered initially if Starmer had just been ambushed by the interviewer, and these stilted responses were just an ­innocent brain freeze during a demanding campaign. I know the language of ­favourites also makes some folk indecisive.

Strangely detached

If you aren’t ­inclined to process the world ­hierarchically – if you don’t think in ­favourites and bests – questions like this can be difficult to answer on the hop. Caught short, even someone with good answers might find themselves swithering. But these strangely detached responses seem characteristic of the man who is now more or less guaranteed to be the UK’s next prime minister.

The Labour leader was invited on to ­Desert Island Discs back in 2020. And true enough, once you dig past the ‘80s hits which dominated his music choices – a point in his favour – the book this castaway wanted to take with him into exile was “a very detailed atlas” – rather confirming the impression he gives this past week of a man with no real interest in the life of the mind outside the coordination and control of material facts.

His luxury, by the way, was a football. Keepie-uppies for one on the beach, presumably.

Sir Keir Starmer

“Part of being Keir” – he explained to his interviewer – “is just ploughing on.........

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