No one should expect Keir Starmer to arrive at the Labour party conference in Liverpool next week dressed in a wetsuit and waving wildly from a jet ski as Ed Davey did for his in Brighton on Saturday.

The prime minister often expresses his distaste for “performative politics”, and if the consensus is that he has overdone the gloom or could do with showing a bit of the Liberal Democrat leader’s ebullience, it might also be accepted that they have very disparate roles to play. Whereas Starmer once said that ordinary people worried about their future weren’t going to take much comfort from him doing stunts like a bungee jump, Davey’s desperation to be noticed in the last election meant he just did one anyway.

Despite such differences in style, the two leaders are more similar than they might seem. They met privately for dinner at the home of a mutual friend in the legal profession a couple of years ago, and by all accounts got on well enough to establish a level of respect for each other’s motives. The prime minister says that Davey “seems pretty straightforward” while the Lib Dem leader in turn says Starmer appears to be “a decent guy”. They share a background of having cared for their chronically sick mothers and are now middle-aged family men who appear to wear the “Sir” prefixed to their names with suitably self-effacing awkwardness. And both........

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