LAST YEAR I pointed to a “now they tell us” feeling about the newspapers, as pundit after pundit who had backed Keir Starmer now admitted he was — as the left had said all along — an empty vessel for right-wing Labour operators who can’t win under their own name.

We are now having a second, greater rush of “now they tell us” across Fleet Street.

So Catherine Bennett in the Observer wrote a sharp column about how Starmer is becoming a Cameron-copy-PM. Bennett did the work to prove the point, especially with this paragraph: “Since it can’t be plagiarism, only shared passion can explain why Starmer and David Cameron have phrased their ambitions in identical terms, in wanting, say, a “bonfire of red tape” (Starmer 2024; Cameron 2014). Starmer thinks regulations are “suffocating” (likewise Cameron); Starmer says “we are the builders” (ditto George Osborne); Starmer wants to end “dithering” (Cameron, “cut through the dither”); Starmer declares Britain “open for business” (Cameron, same, 2012); Starmer confronts those “talking our country down” (so did Cameron, 2011).”