KEIR Starmer doesn’t have a favourite book. He doesn’t have a favourite poem. He hasn’t thought about whether he’s an extroverted or introverted person. He had, he claims, no childhood fears.

And perhaps most curiously, he tells Charlotte Edwardes in The Guardian this weekend that he doesn’t have a dreamlife either. Never has. His head hits the pillow after the long day is done, and his mind is just a blank colourless void till dawn.

As rhetoric goes, Sir Keir was never ­likely to channel Martin Luther King Jr – but “I don’t have a dream” is just that bit too much on the nose. Starmer doesn’t seem to be boasting here. He reports all this ­inexperience and incuriosity factually – like a man without imagination, who can’t imagine what an imagination would be ­useful for.

I wondered initially if Starmer had just been ambushed by the interviewer, and these stilted responses were just an ­innocent brain freeze during a demanding campaign. I know the language of ­favourites also makes some folk indecisive.

Strangely detached

If you aren’t ­inclined to process the world ­hierarchically – if you don’t think in ­favourites and bests – questions like this can be difficult to answer on the hop. Caught short, even someone with good answers might find themselves swithering. But these strangely detached responses seem characteristic of the man who is now more or less guaranteed to be the UK’s next prime minister.

The Labour leader was invited on to ­Desert Island Discs back in 2020. And true enough, once you dig past the ‘80s hits which dominated his music choices – a point in his favour – the book this castaway wanted to take with him into exile was “a very detailed atlas” – rather confirming the impression he gives this past week of a man with no real interest in the life of the mind outside the coordination and control of material facts.

His luxury, by the way, was a football. Keepie-uppies for one on the beach, presumably.

Sir Keir Starmer

“Part of being Keir” – he explained to his interviewer – “is just ploughing on. ­Knowing what I’m doing, knowing where I’ve got to go, without allowing myself time to stop and have a discussion with myself. I’ve just got this thing about keeping going.”

If you like your politicians stolid and grounded in the material universe, with no imagination and no curiosity, then I dare say bookless, poemless, dreamless Keir may be the man for you.

I saw someone suggesting that his wholesale disavowal of lightness and creativity was “refreshingly serious” in contrast to the recent spate of politicians who act like they’re hearing voices, from Liz Truss’s Don Quixote impression. Maybe.

But a more sceptical reading would ­suggest this is a self-portrait of a man without introspection, without emotional intelligence, without an imagination, and without a hinterland to speak of.

And more concerning than all that – he’s about to experience his life’s first ­nightmares as he stands on the cusp of one of the most stressful jobs human beings have yet ­devised for one of their number.

Fields of wheat

Quickfire questions have the habit of producing inadvertently revealing and ­politically memorable answers during election campaigns. Back in 2017, ­Theresa May took the prize for her admission that the naughtiest thing she’d ever done was “running through fields of wheat” as a child, pursued by irate Oxfordshire farmers, concerned her and her no-doubt equally proper pal were gently trampling their crops.

You and I might be able to think up several worse things the last Tory PM but three got up to. Nobody expected May to confess to a tequila bender in ­Port-au-Prince in 1983. But this self-conscious non-anecdote perfectly captured the stilted strangeness of this prim vicar’s daughter who decided she wanted to ­pursue a public life, and was still ­learning to pass as a fully human being in her sixth decade.

Peter Ustinov had a good line on working with a young Stanley Kubrick on Spartacus, observing at that stage that the rookie director had “none of the ­virtues and none of the vices of youth”. This ­observation fits May like a glove – and on the strength of recent interviews, seems to fit Starmer too.

Sir Keir and Anas Sarwar

Journalistic efforts to crack open Sir Keir’s inner life – if such a thing exists – have not proven terrifically effective so far. One of the misleading cliches of our pop-psychological times is the ­assumption that there must always be a ­hidden ­personality beneath the public mask a politician wears, and that calculating politicians are well advised to keep their private selves concealed from wheedling interviewers looking to expose them.

Professional persona

Sometimes, of course, this is true. Most of us in professional life have ­different ­versions of ourselves we ­project at ­different times. Sometimes some ­politicians have worked up a ­wonderful professional ­persona that they can turn on and turn off at whim – the ­public and the private version.

Actors often have a flair for this too – all charm and ­bonhomie on the sofa, then screaming abdabs and professional jealousies off air. But not everyone works this way. Pull away some people’s masks and the faces come off too. Underneath, there’s nothing but a whole lot of void staring back.

I wonder how much Starmer’s professional training is in play here too. Law can shrink your world, intellectually and ­emotionally. While history boasts a few great literary lawyers – Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson – the law remains one of those areas of ­human ­activity which is generally associated with intellectual heft, but where the ­practitioners quite often lack philosophy, history or much in the way of emotional intelligence.

Starmer is hardly alone in being an ­advocate everyone expects to be more ­vivid than he is on account of the QC’s badge he used to wear. The Victorian ­image of the barrister still prevails, ­despite being disappointed time and again by ­lawyer politicians.

You might imagine someone who ­literally advocates for a living would be able to grab and keep the attention of their audience, understand the power of emotional range in rhetoric.

This is true in art and drama – but rather less so in real life, I’m afraid, which goes a long way to explaining why the intermittent decision to televise court cases tends to result in rather disgruntled social media reviews of the lawyers’ performances, which are often perceived as charmless, baffling and impenetrable to the uninitiated. You can be smart, forensic, and clear – and also ­utterly tedious to the ordinary listener.

Handle an audience

Unlike actors, comics – or even, dare I say it, university lecturers – in the ­absence of jury work, there’s no ­powerful ­professional incentive to learn how to handle an audience.

It was the wife of another Labour ­politician – Denis Healey – who ­popularised the idea that politicians ought to have a ­hinterland. Her husband may have been an old flamethrower of the Labour right, but there’s no denying Healey’s intellect and broader curiosity about the world.

Edna Healey famously reckoned ­Margaret Thatcher lacked one – ­given her relentless preoccupation with ­politics from dawn till dusk. Given the rich ­intellectual life of failed politicians like Michael Foot and Healey himself – ­having a hinterland is no guarantee of political success.

Times change. Having a hinterland as a contemporary politician – rather than being able to plausibly evoke ­everyman status, no matter how inauthentic this may be – is probably a good way of ­getting yourself labelled pretentious and ­unelectable.

Nobody’s asking the Labour leader to play Hamlet. The ability to make up your mind is a critical executive function – but a capacity for introspection is a strength and not a weakness. Emotional intelligence is a strength, not a weakness. Narrowness isn’t proof of what a practical guy you are either. Stoicism isn’t about being unable to express and process your feelings, but in understanding we have to process conscious and unconscious challenges in life, and only self-awareness gives us the tools we need even to try to do so.

Tony Blair memorably dismissed the Scottish press as ­“unreconstructed wankers”. Decades on, it is ­curious ­seeing his successor model the kind of ­emotionally inarticulate and ­uncomfortable ­masculinity which ­continues to do men such untold harm.