SOMETIMES in politics, not being someone else is more important than being yourself. The most glaring example of this can be seen across the Atlantic, where President Joe Biden is on course to slip seamlessly into the history books as a forgettable President. There have been many before him – men who have been there, sailed the ship without hitting any large rocks but, ultimately, done nothing terribly memorable.

President Biden’s job is not to be President Biden – it is to not be President Trump. That is the essential requirement of the post, and he will most likely perform it perfectly competently for four years while he keeps his chair in the Oval Office warm for his successor, presumably Vice President Kamala Harris.

There are some parallels here in the UK. For President Joe Biden, we may read Sir Keir Starmer. Sir Keir’s first and most important job is to not be Jeremy Corbyn.

It is easy to forget how critical, and how difficult, that specific job is. Labour’s electoral performance is one aspect of it – its 202 seats in the last General Election was its worst performance in nearly 100 years, and fewer than half the seats it won in Tony Blair’s landslide a couple of decades before.

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But there are other, far more important strands hampering the recovery from Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, and the return of Labour to mainstream, decent politics. It is easy, but dangerous, to forget that in 2019 an entire ethnic community – Jewish people – lived in varying degrees of fear about what would come of them if Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party became this country’s government.

Perhaps less malevolent but equally socially and electorally problematic, large swathes of Labour voters, particularly pro-Brexit voters in the north, remain discombobulated at being told that their patriotism is, at best, misguided and, at worst, racist.

Sir Keir cannot flick a switch to fix this problem. The commentariat and the media may have short memories, but voters do not.

Northern, working-class, pro-Brexit voters remember their Englishness and Britishness being questioned. Southern, economically-conscious voters remember how close the economy came to being run by John McDonnell, Britain’s most prominent Marxist.

Older voters of all ideological persuasions remember Messrs Corbyn and McDonnell’s relationship with the armed Irish republican movement. And younger voters of all ideological persuasions remember looking for a credible policy on climate change, and being unable to find one.

In and of themselves, these ingredients can explain why the Labour party remains on fire; what makes matters worse is that the government of Boris Johnson is pouring industrial quantities of petrol on it.

Mr Johnson undoubtedly had trouble in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, and that was reflected in polling at the time, which had Labour challenging the Tories and saw Sir Keir with a healthy head-to-head lead over Mr Johnson.

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However, to paraphrase Lenin, decades of change has happened in the space of a few months. The virulent criticism Mr Johnson endured over his early response has been replaced by fulsome praise of his leadership of the vaccine rollout programme. For the first time since Brexit, the UK seems to have held its head up, and Mr Johnson is experiencing a gargantuan bounce in public opinion as a result.

He has consolidated that by ploughing eye-watering sums of money into the Covid recovery, and specifically on the levelling-up agenda. It is becoming troublesome to place the words ‘Conservative’ and ‘Boris’ in the same sentence.

These individual characteristics are impactful in themselves. But together, all the Corbyn effects and all the Covid effects make Sir Keir’s job, right now, nearly impossible.

We saw what happened in Hartlepool. And, as you read this column, we may have seen a repeat in Batley and Spen. If we have, the vultures will circle above Sir Keir, primarily from the defeated hard left.

The single worst thing the Labour party could do is to pay any attention to them.

I am not a member of a political party, nor am I politically partisan. So I understand that it is easy for me – and difficult for others – to be told to be patient, to sit tight, to keep schtum. But that is what Labour must do.

The next General Election is probably still over two years away. That is a long time in politics. By then, we hope and presume, the acute phase of the pandemic will be long past. Britain will no longer have such clear vaccine leadership. Post-furlough unemployment will, unfortunately, be on the high side. And if we can’t already feel it in our pocket, we will see the repayment of the Covid recovery splurge on the horizon.

In other words, it is highly likely that Sir Keir is currently experiencing peak-Boris. In the words of the song associated with his lingering predecessor, things can only get better.

Sir Keir should content himself with being in broadly the same position on most of the issues as most of the people. He is economically centrist, with a belief in regulated free markets. So are most people. He is socially liberal. So are most people, or at least most of his target voters. He is comfortable in his Britishness, whilst seeing space for structural reform to hold the UK together. So are most people, in all of the constituent countries of the UK.

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He lacks the ups and downs, the highs and lows, the good days and bad days of Mr Johnson, but he has a consistency which may well be rewarded if voters flock towards some steady certainty after a tumultuous start to the decade.

It may not yet be clear whether Sir Keir is the President Biden figure – steadying the ship until a captain comes along who can steer it into Downing Street – or whether he is the captain who can both steady the ship and then accelerate it in the two-or-so years before the next General Election.

But what is entirely clear is that if the captain of the ship is replaced by someone who wants to violently steer it lefwards, he or she will hit rocks so large, so sharp, that, this time, the wreckage may never be recovered.

• Andy Maciver is Director of Message Matters

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.