By Sir Keir Starmer’s own admission, he’s not exactly Rocky Balboa in the boxing ring. The Labour leader recently confessed to Andrew Marr that his pugilistic style leans more toward the limp-wristed than the iron-fisted—more likely to tickle an opponent into submission than knock them cold. “I punch like a girl,” he said, with the kind of self-deprecation that makes you wonder if he’s fishing for a sympathy vote or just trying to dodge the inevitable YouTube montage of his flailing. Naturally, this revelation has set tongues wagging and keyboards clacking, because in Britain nothing stirs the pot like a politician admitting they’re rubbish at something macho.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen—or rather, how the mildly competent have slumped into a cushioned irrelevance. Here we have a man who’s spent his career dodging punches in the courtroom, only to step into the political ring and discover he can’t land one to save his life. It’s a confession that conjures images of Starmer in satin shorts, gloves dangling like oven mitts, shadowboxing a mirror and losing badly. You can almost hear the crowd at PMQs jeering, “Stick to the briefs, Keir!”—and they wouldn’t mean the boxing kind.
Of course, the commentariat has seized on this with the glee of a tabloid hack spotting a royal in a compromising selfie. Does it matter, they ask, that our potential next PM fights like he’s auditioning for a Jane Austen adaptation rather than a gritty reboot of The Sweeney? In an age where leadership is still faintly judged by whether you could wrestle a bear—or at least not embarrass yourself trying—the optics aren’t great. Kemi Badenoch, one imagines, is already plotting a campaign ad: slow-motion footage of Starmer flapping at a punchbag, set to the tune of “Sweet Caroline,” just to ram the point home.
Yet let’s not be too hasty to consign Sir Keir to the canvas of history. After all, this is a man who’s made a career out of turning dull competence into a virtue. He’s the human equivalent of a beige cardigan—unexciting, yes, but reliably warm when the winds of chaos blow. Perhaps “punching like a girl” is his secret weapon: a cunning feint to lull opponents into a false sense of security before he unleashes a barrage of… well, sternly worded legal letters. It’s not Raging Bull, but it might just get the job done in a country where the real fight happens over tea and biscuits, not blood and bruises.
The irony is thick enough to choke on. Starmer’s spent years dodging the Corbynite left hooks and Tory uppercuts, only to reveal he’s been shadowboxing with pillows all along. Meanwhile, the nation watches, half-amused, half-appalled, as if we’ve stumbled into a reality show called Britain’s Got No Talent. Does it matter? Only if you think a PM needs the grit of a bareknuckle brawler rather than the guile of a barrister who knows the rules better than his fists. In the end, Starmer’s girlish jab might not win him a title bout, but it could still land him a second term in Number 10—assuming he doesn’t trip over his own gloves on the way.