Faced with an absolutely disastrous set of results in last week’s local elections, Keir Starmer waited a few hours to emerge from the shadows and answer questions from the media. When he finally did appear, the leader of the Labour Party had nothing to offer beyond a series of verbal circumlocutions so meaningless he might as well have stayed silent. Asked by the BBC about his catastrophic election performance — which saw Labour hemorrhage council seats throughout the country, but also the County Durham constituency of Hartlepool, a solid Labour seat since its creation in 1947 — Starmer proved so unable to say anything of substance that he was ultimately forced to regurgitate the same stock answers for several minutes straight.

STARMER: This is not a question of left or right. It’s a question of whether we’re facing the country. We have changed as a party, but we’ve not made a strong enough case to the country. We’ve lost that connection, that trust, and I intended to rebuild that and do whatever is necessary to rebuild that trust.

BBC: But what does change mean in, say, policy terms?

STARMER: It means stopping, as a party, quarreling amongst ourselves, looking internally, and facing the country, and setting out that bold vision for a better Britain . . . 

BBC: Sorry, Sir Keir, what is that vision?

STARMER: . . .  changing the things that need changing, and that is the change that I will bring about.

Pressed again and again by his interviewer, Starmer’s evasions only grew more absurd — his solitary brush with anything even approaching a political vision being a momentary reference to ending “the injustice and inequality that millions of people face every day.” Encouraged to develop the idea further, however, he again defaulted to the same vague language about learning lessons, facing the country, and rebuilding trust: