 While the England football team have taken a brave stance against racism by taking a knee at the start of matches, Britain's political leaders had remained fairly silent. On Monday Boris Johnson's spokesperson refused to condemn fans that booed players as they protested against racism. And Keir Starmer has said, as usual, nothing. That has now all changed. So six days after the initial incident, the Prime Minister's spokesperson said that Boris Johnson wants fans to cheer England's players on, not boo them. Now, a couple of hours after that story broke, the Guardian published an exclusive interview with Keir Starmer, in which he accused the Prime Minister of failing to show leadership. Now, Starmer told the paper, the idea you boo the team is completely wrong. This is the response to what is an important collective decision by the team about their expression of their opposition to discrimination and racism. That's a decision they've taken. And I think they're right. All of us should support them and all of us in a position to do so should show leadership as Gareth Southgate has done and have the courage to call it out and say it's the wrong thing to do. The Prime Minister was wrong when he refused to call it out. He didn't have the guts to call it out. He hedged his bets and in doing so, he undermined the team on the verge of this competition. He didn't have the courage to side with the players. That is leadership. Compare and contrast him and Gareth Southgate on this. He didn't have the courage to stand by the England team on the verge of this competition. And he's wrong about that. And that's a failure of leadership. Now, that's all very well. I agree with everything Keir Starmer has said there. The problem is it took him six days to say it. So if you're saying Boris Johnson didn't show leadership because he didn't condemn the people booing the England players, he even did Keir Starmer, right, until six days later. Now, why did it take this long? It could have been that they were waiting for a focus group to deliver back their results. Or it could have been that like the rest of us, Keir Starmer's team were on Twitter on Thursday and saw that YouGov had actually done a poll on this and that their silence was very much out of step with the general public. So YouGov did a poll among fans across all of Europe, because obviously countries all across Europe who were entering Euro 2020, and they found overwhelming support for people taking the knee basically everywhere, most strongly in Portugal, which I found somewhat surprising. But also very strong in England. So in England, 54% of people support players taking the knee. Only 39% of people oppose it. That rockets to 78% of people when only asking ethnic minority Britons. Only 12% of ethnic minority Britons oppose taking the knee. Aaron Starmer has finally come to the right position, but he sure has taken his time. Does he demonstrate the failure of leadership that he accuses Boris Johnson of? 100%. I mean, what he's saying about Gareth Southgate is embodying a certain kind of leadership I entirely endorse. I think it's absolutely true. I think what Gareth Southgate has done is show real moral courage, which is incredible. You see it so rarely in British public life, it's kind of like, oh, wow, he's doing something not to be popular, because often people make these statements. So I stand with the LGBT community or Black Lives Matter, and then they become really unpopular. And then they go, oh, God, yeah, you're right. Solidarity with the Palestinian people under occupation. And they become unpopular. People criticize them. They might start losing jobs. They might start having, have people who they respect say, that's wrong. Actually, I don't agree with you on that. And they don't have moral courage. And so they say, oh, you know what, you're right. It's complicated. They might even take back what they initially said. And what Gareth Southgate has doubled down, not a belligerent way. And he said, no, actually, I've thought about this as a team we've collectively decided this. This is what we're going to do. And that's leadership. And so Stammer's right to observe leadership and highlight the facts. But like you say, Michael, this is another classic example of Keir Starmer, ambulance chasing a political cause. You know, people call him Captain Heinz, I think for good reason. And I think this is an example of that. And it has that double problem for him. Because like you say, the leadership qualities, the moral courage, and I would not use those two words with Keir Starmer, by the way, moral courage, put them out of the window. They really highlight his own deficiencies. Because those are the exact things he doesn't embody. You know, you might not agree with Brexit. I don't think Boris Johnson agree with that at one point. But the whole point of that political project that took the tourists to a major majority a couple of years ago was, there's this thing, we're going to do it. We think it's the right thing, because that's what people voted for. You know, and that's a politics, again, that Labour and Keir Starmer put themselves in opposition to. Or any number of causes over the 18 months since he's been the leader more than a year, you would never associate him with moral courage. So, yeah, I think this is doubly bad for him. I think at this point, Michael, I mean, it's a bit of a tangent, but I think just Keir's kind of a bit of a joke, right? You know, I was watching Arsenal Fan TV on YouTube and they're like taking the piss out of Keir Starmer. Now, that's really cut through. The guy's a bit of a joke. What I think people dislike about Keir Starmer is actually strange enough what he was pitching. It's just that his pitch has really not gone down very well. You know, I don't really believe in very much. And I'm going to be a technocrat and I'm going to be professional and wear a suit and people go, Oh, wow, you're just a technocrat. You just wear a suit. You don't really believe in anything. And it's kind of like, for me, that's what's really interesting with Starmer is that people dislike him not because they've not seen enough of him, not because they don't interpret him properly or because he's been misrepresented in media, they identify precisely what he's trying to sell. And that's what they don't like. What really struck out this week was that you've shown that Keir Starmer now has ratings, which are, you know, just as bad as Jeremy Corbyn was at this same stage in his leadership. And I can say, Oh, why are you critiquing someone for being just as unpopular as the guy you supported? Well, Jeremy Corbyn was subject to a really big smear campaign. Keir Starmer hasn't been. And what's interesting, you know, you might say, Oh, well, we're being biased because we're saying maybe he has been subject to a smear campaign and we're not recognizing it. Even Keir Starmer's stands don't say the media have misrepresented him. You know, no one is out there claiming, Oh, the reason people don't like Keir Starmer is because he's been misrepresented. He's clearly been correctly represented. The media have reported Keir Starmer as he is. I mean, it's because they don't find him threatening. Why would they bother to smear him? But they have reported him as he is. The public don't like him. And he's panicking now because what can you do if they're seeing the real you and they don't like it? That's exactly it. I mean, it's unique, Mike. We're looking here at a story in British public life, which the media are accurately representing. It doesn't happen very often. It's happened with Keir Starmer. I mean, you know, I'll be honest, Michael, you know, and I think you and I were similar on this. We were open minded about Keir Starmer. And I think the pitch that he had when he became leader, I'll be 80% of Corbyn's policies, but I'll be wearing a suit and lead into my credentials as a former director of public prosecutions. Actually, if you really mean that, I think that's a really great thing to aspire to as Labour leader. Obviously, he didn't. But I never thought he would be this not even bad. I never thought the numbers would fall apart this quickly. You know, you look for instance, I didn't, I definitely didn't 18 to 24s. You've got I think Labour on 35, the down like 20 something. You've got like the green second on like 24. I mean, we've got this on Twitter today. And the choice on 21. And people say, all right, you just very four year olds don't vote. I mean, this is your base. Minorities, renters, graduates, the young, public sector workers. We saw a poll recently, actually, an astonishing number of nurses back Boris Johnson, not particularly fond of Keir Starmer. You know, Labour are really looking at a real hiding at the next general election. Like it's frightening. And I think we're going to get a glimpse of a battle in spend. And what's different with battle in spend, and I will bring this back to the Southgate thing. What's different with battle in spend to say Harley pool is, Harley pool is super explicable in terms of long term trends. Battle in spend is really different. You know, yes, it was a marginal. Yes, you know, has elements of people that wants to leave the European Union and so on. It was a big file right there. Not long ago. I mean, obviously, the terrible events around Joe Cox demonstrate that. I think the BMP of the National Front, you know, back in the day, big locally. But what they what they really show I think in battle in spend is the potential of Labour's vote, the potential of Labour's vote to vulcanize. And in battle in spend, you're seeing that with Labour and George Galloway, right, potentially. So some Labour voters may be going over to the Tories. Some may be going to other parties for whatever reason, and then you've got George Galloway. And that's going to happen, I think, in lots of places. You know, Labour's problem now is losing voters both to your left and to your right, which is something that Jeremy Corbyn 2017 almost miraculously actually over, you know, he overcame. So it was the exact same challenge that was confronting a milliband in 2015. So going back to the Gareth Southgate thing, you know, it just reeks of desperation like so many of these things. Just don't say anything here. You weren't on the story. Look, we're content creators of our media, Michael. You know, you don't talk about a story from three weeks ago on Tisgy Sour, do you? People aren't interested anymore. If you want to show political leadership, if you want to influence the debate here, you should do it when you should have done it, which wasn't, you know, on Friday. It was on Monday or it was last week. And it was a real open goal as well, by the way. If you want to call yourself an England football supporter, don't be the team. Not hard.