On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love said to me: ‘Sir Keir Starmer’s giving a speech in Bristol – is he always this demoralising?’

And she was right. Before our Yuletide tinsel was off the chimney piece, the political class was resuming its mirthless, clichéd, soul-sapping war against the human soul. Labour’s leader, with his genius for dullness, was first out of the gluepot.

By gum, it was glum. After all the recent tidings of great joy, tra-la-la, we were subjected to a speech of the most droning drudgery. It stuck to one’s fingers like eggy dough. The content was unrelenting stale, the pace glacial, the mood constipated. It sounded as if it was being parped through a half-blocked baritone tuba. And a Happy New Year to you, too, Sir Keir!

He announced that we were ‘a downtrodden country’ and that things had never been so bad. From the tempo, which was a lot slower than the 20mph you’re allowed to go in Labour Wales, it was apparent that he intended to make us even more oppressed.

We were ‘exhausted, tired, despairing’ and what we needed – pause, phlegmy gulp, leaden swivel of two lifeless headlights as he worked his jaw to scrape more words off a flobbing tongue – was ‘a new mindset, Mission Government’.

On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love said to me: ‘Sir Keir Starmer’s giving a speech in Bristol – is he always this demoralising?’

Behind him were some large, shiny, high-tech instruments. Microscopes to help the audience identify some electoral policies, perhaps

To capture the full majesty of his oratory you should try saying that while pinching your nostrils between forefinger and thumb. As slogans go, it really is magnificently prosaic.

The venue was the National Composites Centre. Let me stress that is not a satirical invention. There truly is an establishment with that boring name and the political party notorious for its trade union composite motions really did choose it for this ‘look at us, we’re different now’ election-year launch.

Sir Keir was introduced to a smallish crowd by a posh blonde who was standing as Labour’s candidate in the local constituency. She was possibly a little wooden – gestures from the Bill and Ben school – but beside Sir Keir, she could have been Demosthenes.

And then our hero was at the lectern, blinking with that expression of perpetual slight astonishment he has. It’s nothing compared to the puzzlement of the nation.

Behind him were some large, shiny, high-tech instruments. Microscopes to help the audience identify some electoral policies, perhaps. On that front, all we were given, once again, was a pledge to wreck independent schools and the intention to impose a non-dom tax, which in Sir Keir’s blocked-nose voice sounds like a condom tax. There was some stuff about cleaning up the honours system. This would have been more convincing from a party that had not sent Tom Watson to the House of Lords.

The content was unrelenting stale, the pace glacial, the mood constipated. It sounded as if it was being parped through a half-blocked baritone tuba. And a Happy New Year to you, too, Sir Keir!

Sir Keir made one of his Arsenal jokes and was rewarded with a ripple of laughter that seemed to say ‘good grief, that’s lame’. There were a few attempts to be chuckingly matey, saying ‘but look’ and ‘now then’ like a sub-Denis Norden.

Blimey it was dire. His voice had fluff on the stylus so that ‘ramped’ became ‘rumped’ and ‘that’ became ‘vert’. There were numerous ‘franklys’ and I lost count of how often he had been ‘very clear’. At one point, he tried coming over all blokeish about the darts. Excruciating.

The delivery plodded like a hippopotamus waddling into the swamp for its morning sit-down. We had suffered enough of ‘this miserabilist Tory project’ and we needed ‘a new Project Hope’. You or I, selling optimism, might lift the voice a touch, flute the larynx. We might give the sentence a bit of Basil Brush, a waggle of eyebrows, some French bottom-pincher’s vroum-vroum. Not Sir Keir. He said ‘a new Project of Hope’ like an accountant listing his fees for the annual tax return. A Soviet Union soup-kitchen waiter would have sounded more excited listing his broth of the day. The adenoidal staleness was worthy of the late Peter Cook’s E.L.Wisty, but lacked his briskness.

It could be a very long year.