In a particularly tortuous three minutes of Starmer’s phone-in with Nick Ferrari on LBC, a caller asked Keir a simple question: “Without the waffle about believing Labour wouldn’t win the 2019 election just give me a simple yes or no answer had Labour won the election in 2017 or 2019 would you be happy to serve in the cabinet under Prime Minister Corbyn.” Starmer couldn’t…

Starmer eventually got out a defence:

“It’s a pure hypothetical that didn’t cross my mind because I didn’t think we would win… there were important things that I thought needed to be done from the frontbench, to continue and complete on the Brexit work to make it absolutely clear that the Labour Party never deviated from our position on NATO, uh and to do the necessary work on anti-Semitism.”

Does being in the shadow cabinet no longer mean you’d serve in the actual cabinet? Ferrari pointed out that Starmer trashed the Tory manifesto as “Corbyn-like” despite being in the room to approve and sign off on Corbyn’s manifesto itself. Eventually Starmer said: “after we lost that badly we did have a soul search in the Labour Party and we actually did a report on this that was commissioned for me – one of the things that was very very clear coming back from the voters was um we didn’t think that the Manifesto was deliverable.” An admission that he believed it would work when he campaigned for Corbyn and signed off on it…