It probably ought to be more talked about that Starmer is an incredibly inexperienced politician, arguably the least experienced ever to become the leader of a major party [brief thread]

His meteoric rise is completely due to what Canadians call the "star candidate" phemenon, people otherwise notable in public life who get a recognition boost vs their peers when they enter politics.

This helped him get selected in Holborn (easily on the first ballot) v two council leaders, he then get talked up as leader as soon as he became an MP (!) and he was then on the front bench almost immediately and in the shadow cabinet within a year...

But while he obviously has a lot of the transferable skills to be a competent leader he is still naturally going to be deferring a lot on matters of raw politics, to what extent I don't know, but it probably merits talking about more.

There is a related point here which is that the Labour membership inevitably reproduces some of the deferential aspects of GB society, and there is an element of deference involved in making him leader, "thank you Sir for gracing our ridiculous party with your star presence"

Someone who had no professional reason at all to take this route has chosen to do it, and this makes Labour members feel better about devoting their spare time to what for about 70% of its history has been a somewhat fruitless endeavour.