No ideas, no plan, and no answers – Keir Starmer is the new Neil Kinnock and voters will see through his Sir Shifty act

KEIR STARMER is counting on a by-election hat-trick on Thursday to propel him into Downing Street next year with an outright ­Labour majority.

With Tories braced for defeat in Selby, Somerton and Frome, and Boris Johnson’s vacated Uxbridge seat, everything seems to be coming up red roses for nearly-new Labour.

So, on election day 2024, will the last Tory to leave Britain turn out the lights?

Or could we be witnessing Peak Starmer?

Is this a reprise of Tony Blair’s 1997 triumph . . . or a re-run of Neil Kinnock’s 1992 election flop?

Labour is still streets ahead in the polls and Tory leader Rishi Sunak is struggling to deliver his pledges on the economy and immigration.

But The Sun’s iconic 1992 front page displaying Kinnock’s head in a lightbulb has more in common with today’s political landscape than Blair’s sunny optimism in ’97.

Tony Blair deserved to win.

He had fresh ideas, persuasive policies and shedloads of cash bequeathed by defeated Tories.

By contrast, Welsh firebrand Kinnock, the Jeremy Corbyn of his day, had jettisoned all the loony left-wing views which had catapulted him into the party leadership.

Remind you of anyone?

Kinnock fooled plenty of pundits and pollsters.

But he didn’t fool the punters.

They saw him for the second-rate sham he really was.

On April 9, 1992, they turned out in droves.

John Major led the Tories to a fourth-term victory with 14,093,007 votes — the highest total for any political party in any UK General Election.

Nobody is daft enough to predict a similar outcome next year.

But the latest polls show a slip of seven per cent in Labour’s lead.

Broken promises

They are still way ahead, but voters have begun to clock Labour’s twists, U-turns and broken promises.

And they have no more appetite for Sir Keir Starmer KC as their next PM than for the Welsh Windbag all those years ago.

Even his own party, MPs and trade union paymasters distrust the man who sat like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice at ­Jew-baiting Jeremy Corbyn’s knee for four years.

Since then, like Kinnock, Starmer has somersaulted on every policy he backed as a shadow minister — on public spending, rejoining the EU, immigration and climate change.

“Shifts in policy have made him look shifty,” an unnamed trade union leader tells the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.

Her viewers were just as critical yesterday: “He doesn’t have any ideas, he doesn’t have a plan, he doesn’t have any answers.”

Labour’s reach-for response to every problem is to hurl taxpayers’ cash at it — until, as its ex-Treasury chief Liam Byrne famously confessed after they were kicked out last time, “There’s no money left”.

Sir Shifty recently promised to spend a whopping £28BILLION every year for Labour’s green revolution.

Now, to the fury of green zealot Ed Miliband, he says he won’t.

Believe it if you like.

He admits huge union pay claims are unaffordable.

Yet he urges ministers to “get round the table” with union militants on deals which can only cost billions.

He backed Just Stop Oil fanatics who paralyse Britain’s traffic.

Now he insists they are wrong to stop ambulances like the ones that took “my mum” to hospital.

As Tory ex-minister Andrea Leadsom adroitly pointed out, Labour has voted against every Tory measure to get these idiots off our streets.

Like drunken sailors

Voters notice these things.

Just as they noted the image of Starmer and his leftie deputy Angela Rayner “bending the knee” to protesters and rioters.

Or his U-turns over free school meals and his about-face over university tuition fees.

Renationalise water, railways and electricity suppliers?

Rejoin the EU, raise top-rate income tax? Yes, but no, but . . .

Sir Shifty looks more like Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard than a principled wannabe PM.

Ask where he will find the money Labour will inevitably spend like drunken sailors and there is no answer.

Under pressure yesterday, he promised to “grow” the economy and “reform” public services.

This vague waffle can mean anything the lawyerly Sir Shifty wants it to mean.

We can leave those lights on for a while.

They will help voters check the small print.