For the longest time, I wasn’t sure what to make of Keir Starmer. Turns out, my first impression that he seemed like a 6ft blob of nothingness wasn’t too far from the truth.

Sadly, there is more to Starmer than his blandness and it is there that we find his danger.

Since taking a massive lead over the Tories, Starmer has found an opinion or three stashed down the back of a sofa he must have purchased from a Tory mate (perhaps it was the one he recently confessed to kissing).

Living in Northern Ireland as I do, I’ve had to resign myself to the fact that we will never get to vote for the ruling party in the UK.

The Tories, who I wouldn’t vote for anyway, don’t stand in Northern Ireland in any meaningful sense, while Labour do not stand at all. They don’t even have an NI branch. We’re left to vote for parties dominated by Sinn Fein and the DUP, who often make sure nobody can do anything.

So, it’s hard to become too invested in Labour when they obviously give no fucks about my vote or the vote of anyone like me.

But given how Starmer has behaved since he became the favourite to become the UK’s next PM, it seems to me this isn’t just a problem that is confined to NI.

The way the media is run in the UK, no truly progressive left party is ever going to gain power. Just look at what they did to Jeremy Corbyn. There are intelligent people out there on the left who truly believe Corbyn is a danger to the UK’s national security, so thorough was the media’s hatchet job on a man who put people above profit.

There is no longer an effective publication on the left among the legacy press that can be taken seriously, a situation that has become exacerbated under seven years of Kath Viner’s stewardship of the Guardian.

So, in order to get into government, Labour must present themselves as The Tories in Red at a level that will please Rupert Murdoch (S*n, Times, Financial Times), Lord Rothermere (Mail) and the remaining Barclay brother (Telegraph). Three men, none of whom live in the UK, will determine if Keir Starmer is allowed to take charge of the UK, regardless of what the public actually want. Those three men will tell you what you want and, as we’ve seen with Brexit, far too many will accept what they are told.

Starmer must show that he is not a threat to those billionaire press barons (Leveson 2 has already been ditched), and it is a challenge he is relishing with all the excitement of a GC who has just learned a new conspiracy theory about trans people.

In the last few weeks, Starmer has been praised by the Mail on Sunday for his ‘tough’ stance on trans children following an interview with Mumsnet. This was published at a time he was ignoring Trans Awareness Week and Trans Day of Remembrance completely.

Starmer also picked up a Politician of the Year award from the fascist-supporting Spectator.

Sir Keir Starmer has just been awarded “politician of the year” at the Spectator Awards by the Spectator, the UK’s oldest Tory magazine.

He received a huge round of applause by Tory MPs and others in attendance. pic.twitter.com/PcE5wCS2TI

— Tory Fibs (@ToryFibs) November 23, 2022

Starmer has seen his stance on migrants praised by Nigel Farage, and, despite his comments being somewhat misrepresented, was happy to let the right-wing papers use them to demonise more vulnerable people.

As if that wasn’t enough fuckery for one fortnight, Starmer finished it off by telling trans people he respected their rights while also saying he understood JK Rowling’s concerns about trans people.

Keir Starmer defends trans rights but says he ‘respects’ JK Rowling’s positionhttps://t.co/PSmTurocu2

— PinkNews (@PinkNews) November 25, 2022

This is a man so desperate to sit on the fence, he has failed to realise he has impaled himself.

There was a time in my life when I would meet a woman and, when it was clear she liked me, I’d panic. Believing she couldn’t possibly like me for me, despite that being exactly what she was doing, I started to change to become the person my head told me she wanted.

It never ended well and I was required to undertake a lot of therapy to deal with my very obvious insecurity issues.

That’s what Starmer is doing in his chase for Number 10, being what he thinks people want instead of being himself, which is why people wanted him in the first place.

His lead came about because he was meant to be sensible and not cruel.

He was supposed to be different, somebody who would stand up for minorities, not throw them under his bus and then reverse over them to the cheers of Tory racists and transphobes.

Starmer is lying to somebody, either the people who elected him leader of the Labour party on a set of 10 pledges that have been flung to the side or the right wingers he’s pandering too now.

Either way, he is showing himself to be ‘just like all the others’. He just does it with a soft voice and boring personality.

The public don’t want another shade of Tories, they want change.

They want kindness and tolerance and people working for things together, not fighting to see who can destroy the most.

Time and time again the public show they are not interested in manufactured culture wars, no matter how hard the papers push their narratives. They don’t want to be distracted from corruption, they want it dealt with. They want the problems caused by 12 years of Tories faced head on, named, shamed and fixed.

There is growing unrest in those who hate the Tories and are looking for a viable alternative and until he took that lead, Starmer seemed to be that man for many.

Now, he would be well advised to heed the public, or at the very least Labour members, rather than offering more dog whistles to the bigots.

If he doesn’t, he will blow the biggest political lead in UK history and will have nobody to blame but himself.

Not even sacrificing Jeremy Corbyn further will save him this time.