look weak, and adds to the sinking feeling that this is not someone who's going to be leading the Labour Party to victory anytime soon.
Update: Daniel Finkelstein's latest column in the Times is very much to the point, though he doesn't mention this particular episode:
If a leader can’t win by being true to themselves then they can’t win….
Keir Starmer is a successful liberal lawyer. He is a southerner, a graduate and a London MP who lives in his constituency. These are all good qualities and are accompanied by an impressive intellect, a pleasing personal manner and the experience garnered during a distinguished professional career.
Letting Starmer be Starmer is letting Starmer be someone with much to recommend. Yet instead he has become a leader who’s afraid of being himself and wishing to be seen as someone else. He has become the advocate of abstention and the prince of the withheld punch.
He desperately wants to be the voice of the red wall seats for whom he is not the authentic voice. And voters can see it. In focus groups they call him “Mr Man-on-the-fence” and say that he only jumps off the fence to climb onto a passing bandwagon.
If he really was the Labour leader to get back that red wall, he'd have stood firm. "Going to that church doesn't mean I endorse all their beliefs. Obviously." But he's not that sort of politician.
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