I truly felt for Keir Starmer out there yesterday attempting a few punches at the large bag. I’m surprised only that one of the onlookers did not throw in the towel right there and then. It all evoked memories of Bill Gates on stage throwing some shapes at the Windows 95 launch.

As he tossed out his very first limp-wristed, slow-motion flick at the inanimate sack, scores of Northern Labour votes diffused into the ether.

On the day that Bill Gates announced his separation from his wife, Starmer had heralded his from reality and from the Labour heartlands.

Whoever set that stunt up needs to be taken out, beaten with hot pokers, and then thrashed some more. Sir Keith has the motor skills of a semi-filled, warm stoma and the sense of humour of the surviving, rooted cabin boy forced to drink from it after a shipwreck. He’d have been better suited to a pair oven gloves and retrieving Nana’s casserole from the heart of the Beko.

Perhaps it was somebody’s way of expressing that it was all looking hopelessly rocky.

And if you look carefully, the gloves were attached to wool that his Mum had obviously threaded through the sleeves of his jacket.

He genuinely winced as if the bag was going to hit him back, which rather explains why he cannot muster up any meaningful combinations in the House.

Not even Don King, rapping on speed and swirling those poxy little sandcastle flags about, could have sold the Cardboard Cruiser to the masses.

Perhaps it might have helped if they had strapped the punchbag to a mountain bike and allowed him to get into an SUV before the moment of engagement?

Probably not, because then nothing certainly would have come of it.

As will nothing of his vacant, flaccid ‘opposition’.