Political column – October 14

Having observed the tactics of the game over several decades, I have a coaching tip for teams wishing to prosper.

It is this: Don't drop the ball.

Sir Keir Starmer doesn't look the type to play in the pack, the place of broken noses and cauliflower ears. With his slick hair, with its newly-added glitter, he is a shoo-in for the Number 10 spot, which is of course apt, the playmaker, somebody whose firm and sure grip on the ball is vital for his outfit's success.

He is not in the Barry John mould, being more a Rob Andrew or George Ford, safe and reliable rather than being spectacular.

That’s what his speech at the Labour Party conference was all about. Excised of almost all the socialist policies with which Labour (and Sir Keir) went into the last general election, if you closed your eyes you could easily have been listening to a Tory leader.

That seems to be his chief policy, to make Labour so indistinguishable from the Tories that Labour voters will vote for the party because it's Labour, and Tory voters will vote for Labour because the party is just like the Tories but without the party cake.

As for the substance of the speech, there were no round tables mentioned, which is surprising as he is verily a Knight of the Round Table. His solution to almost everything, from railway strikes to the Channel boats, is to get round the table with somebody or other.

He's big on "working people." This noble group were mentioned a lot, but it must surely only be a matter of time before the phrase is frowned on as being non-inclusive – roughly a quarter of working age Britons do not work.

There are hundreds of thousands of people who have voluntarily left the workforce in the wake of the pandemic, plus the retired, the unemployed, those incapable of doing work, and so on.

Perhaps his most interesting plan was to build "the next generation of Labour new towns." Wisely, he didn't specify where they would be.

Basildon is a new town – now an old new town as it was conceived just after the war – and I happened to be there last Saturday on a first ever visit.

I thought being a postie delivering letters on the maze-like housing estates of Telford (another new town, of course) was a challenging job, but in Basildon our satnav took us into a succession of dead ends and ultimately we steered by our noses.

The soulless town centre, if that's what it was, looked like something designed in the 1960s, which is not meant as a compliment, although there was an interesting structure which had the appearance of a space rocket, but I know now is a bell tower.

There were a lot more empty shops than I expected, having assumed Basildon was part of the affluent south. One block which looked like a huge shoebox appeared to be virtually empty.

You don't need to build new towns, Sir Keir. There are empty and under-used properties in our towns and cities which could be turned into homes without swallowing up land.

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A trap that Sir Keir avoided was to be equivocal about the Hamas attack on Israel.

Jeremy Corbyn would have said he abhors violence on all sides. Sir Keir went out and said it straight – it was a murderous assault on innocents by Hamas terrorists. This was his break with the party's recent past, which caused it such damage.

If you believe some of the reporting of those terrible events last weekend, the attack was a "military" success for Hamas, the result of meticulous planning and adept execution resulting in Israel being taken completely by surprise.

During the week Israel said that it had recovered the bodies of around 1,500 of the heavily-armed attackers who, in their rampage, butchered around 1,000 defenceless men, women, and children.

Far from being a success, it was a disaster for Hamas and a double disaster for the residents crammed into Gaza now cowering in terror under the Israeli bombardment.