‘Shouty Rishi Sunak required a knockout blow he conspicuously did not land’

That was mission accomplished by serious Keir Starmer and near fatally unaccomplished for spoilt child Rishi Sunak.

The Labour challenger only needed to avoid fluffing his lines or falling off the stage so he will be very satisfied.

Starmer was, this close to victory, never going to start juggling and risk smashing the Ming vase he’s carried carefully over a polished marble floor for two years.

The Conservatives’ shouty Prime Minister on the other hand required the knockout blow he conspicuously failed to land.

Ranting Sunak screamed tetchiness, everything somebody else’s fault, opening with a grotesque self-congratulatory lecture to a woman too poor to turn on her oven.

Starmer, the country’s one-time chief prosecutor, played to the jury watching back home in setting out Tory crimes on living standards, public services and border to nail a guilty verdict.

Hope burns eternal yet Sunak’s gabbling and Labour £2,000 tax smear are why he deserves to be toast.

The gilded escalator raising him uninterrupted from privileged private school to top universities, casino banking, heiress wife then No 10 is shuddering to a halt for the first time in a golden life.

No milkshakes in Salford but a proper ding-dong ahead of change on July 4 destined to put Starmer in charge and Sunak out of Downing Street.