It used to be the Americans who arrived here full of blarney. You know the sort of thing: what wonderful people we are, how much they think of us and how we have a special place in their hearts.

Now the British bring the blarney. Keir Starmer came this week, not bearing gifts, but armed with a new vocabulary, which was littered with fine words like “constructive”, “positive” and “productive”.

Indeed, he thinks so much of us (almost as much as Joe Biden) that he intends to “reset the relationship” between London and Belfast.

The Stormont parties loved it. Sinn Féin said he was as different from the Tories as “daylight and dark”. The DUP indicated they trusted him (they also trusted Boris Johnson, but we’ll not mention that) and the SDLP lost the run of themselves a bit when they said “This seems like a new dawn”. (For their homework, the SDLP should write an essay explaining the difference between optimism and naivety.)

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In fairness you tend to get a better class of adjective from Starmer than Sunak, but beyond that, it is hard to find significant differences in their policies.

Welcome to the world of dictionary politics, where New Labour has planted a New English........

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