Starmer needs to ‘establish personality’ says Davidson

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The stinging slapdown from Ms Davidson came after ITV’s Robert Peston quizzed the former leader of the Scottish Conservatives on whether she thought Sir Keir Starmer had the “charisma” to be a successful leader. Sir Keir has found his leadership under the spotlight following a disappointing set of results from the Labour Party. Ms Davidson was on hand to provide some sage advice to the Leader of the Opposition, telling Sir Keir to go find some “personality somewhere.”

Ms Davidson said Sir Keir had a “closing window” in the wake of bad results from Labour in England, losing a string of councils and the “red wall” seat of Hartlepool.

She told Peston: “These are obviously a very bad set of elections for the Labour party in everywhere part from Wales.

“If you look at Tories doing well in England, SNP holding up in Scotland and Labour doing better than expected in Wales it was definitely an incumbency bounce. Probably because of the vaccination programme.

“But I do think he has a closing window in order to establish some personality somewhere.”

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Ms Davidson also warned the embattled Labour leader could go down in history as another Iain Duncan Smith, the Tory leader who was brought down by a vote of no confidence by his own MPs in 2003.

She said: “I think there is a danger the I’ve heard this being discussed today, and I think that there is a danger that Keir Starmer could well be a kind of Labour Iain Duncan Smith.

“Which is actually very solid, serious, from within the tribe, you know, wanting to be undemonstrative, wanting to be all about substance, but actually not cutting through.

“And I think that he’s only got a certain window of time in which to do it.”

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Meanwhile, earlier on in an interview with Peston, Ms Davidson also had strong words in response to plans by Boris Johnson to introduce mandatory voter ID, branding the move “total b*****ks”.

“Given where we are and the year we’ve had, we’ve got real problems to solve in this country and the idea that this is some sort of legislative priority I think is for the birds.”

Ms Davidson added: “I think they can’t cite any evidence of it because I don’t think there’s ever any evidence to cite.”

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Currently, a voter does not need to produce any form of photographic identification or even a polling card in order to cast their ballot.

A Downing Street spokesperson has defended the policy, stating: “Showing ID to vote is a reasonable approach to combat the inexcusable potential for voter fraud in our current system and to strengthen the integrity of our elections.

“Showing ID is something people do when they pick up a parcel at the post office or a library book.

“The 2019 voter ID pilots showed that in elections where photo ID was required, 99.6 percent of electors were able to cast their votes without a problem.”

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