Voters are simply glad that Starmer’s not Corbyn – or Sunak…

Tony, a railway worker, isn’t much bothered by Sir Keir Starmer. ‘I’m not really into politics that much,’ he tells me. ‘I don’t know a lot about him.’

According to the polls, Labour are on course for the biggest majority in British parliamentary history. And with polling day fewer than two weeks away, there is now talk of a ‘socialist supermajority’, in which Starmer will hold unparalleled and untrammelled power.

Surely that must give Tony cause for concern? He shrugs. ‘He seems OK. He’s not said or done anything that really bothers me. I’ll vote for him.’

I’m walking along London Street, in Basingstoke, Hampshire, searching for someone who might be scared. Or, more specifically, someone who is at least unnerved by the man in a slightly creased dark suit and open-neck blue shirt who has just walked into the Garbardine Bar a few doors down.

Starmer is in town for a photo-op promoting Labour’s plans for revitalising Britain’s high streets. But all the headlines today are of Rishi Sunak warning voters not to hand his rival ‘a completely blank cheque to raise taxes on everything – on your car, your home, your work, your pension’.

In the window of a firm of solicitors, Bella and Claire are peering out, possibly in trepidation at this impending tax bombshell. What do they think about the prospect of a ‘Forever Government’ in which Starmer rules in perpetuity?

Bella laughs. ‘At least he’s better than Rishi Sunak,’ she says. Claire agrees. ‘I like him. He seems down-to-earth. He understands people like us.’

If Sunak’s strategy of terrifying wavering voters back into the fold with talk of a Starmer pseudo-dictatorship is going to work anywhere, it should be working here.

With a Conservative majority of 14,198 in 2019, and Labour requiring a swing of more than 12 per cent to snatch the seat from former Culture Secretary Maria Miller, this would normally be expected to be a comfortable Tory hold.

Then I get talking to Chris, an ambulance worker. He previously lived in Portsmouth but became concerned by anti-social behaviour. ‘I wrote to all the parties about it and the Tories were the only ones who wrote back. So I stood for them in the local elections a couple of times.’ Eventually fed up with crime levels, he moved to Basingstoke.

Presumably, as a former Tory council candidate, Chris must be worried about the idea of a gargantuan Starmer majority?

‘Not really. We need change. I wasn’t sure about Starmer at first – he seemed a bit of a wet fish – but he’s got better. He looks the part now.’ Chris says he’ll be voting Labour.

This constituency is comprised of Basingstoke town and several small surrounding villages. So to find someone genuinely alarmed at a possible Starmer landslide, I head to Oakley, a 15-minute drive away.

With thatched cottages and a pretty duck pond, this is hardly natural Labour territory. As I arrive, the village WhatsApp group chat is rapidly filling with responses to an urgent appeal: ‘Has anyone lost a ferret?’

But then I bump into Mark, a gardener. And not for the first time in this increasingly surreal election campaign, my preconceptions are turned upside down. ‘My parents were lifelong Conservatives,’ he tells me, ‘and I’ve voted Tory in the past. But not again.’

I ask which way he’s leaning. ‘Probably Labour,’ he says. ‘Starmer? He’s fine. I think we need something different.’

The Supermajority Strategy was meant to be Sunak’s last throw of the dice. But if my time in Basingstoke is anything to go by, he has rolled Snake Eyes.

There was indeed fear among the people I spoke to. But it wasn’t of a 20 or 30-year Labour administration. What scared them most was the idea of five more years of the Tories.

Crime, the migrant boats, the cost-of-living crisis. The legacy of a decade and a half of Conservative Government is what’s focusing minds in this corner of Hampshire.

The Tory strategy of talking up the concept of a perpetual Labour government is also having another effect. It’s making a Starmer premiership not only seem inevitable but, by extension, acceptable.

People talk about him as if he is already in No 10. There is no sense of jeopardy, or feeling ‘this guy has to be stopped’.

And how could there be? Every Cabinet Minister who appears on TV or radio essentially acknow­ledges the election is in the bag for Sir Keir. So a ballot cast for anyone but Labour is now seen as a wasted vote, and any attempt to resist their inevitable victory an act of futility.

Before going to Basingstoke I discussed Starmer with a Cabinet Minister. There wasn’t great public enthusiasm for him, I observed. ‘Maybe,’ the Minister pondered, ‘but are they scared of him?’

The answer is ‘No’.

It’s true that Starmer remains something of an enigma to most voters. They don’t really get much of a sense of who he is, or what he stands for.

But they don’t care. They know he’s not Rishi Sunak or Jeremy Corbyn. And that’s enough.

Back in the Garbardine Bar, Starmer is taking questions from the assembled press pack. Calm and focused, he punctuates his answers with The Starmer Chop, a karate-like hand gesture he favours when emphasising a key point.

The polls – and even his opponents – are predicting he’ll be Prime Minister in a fortnight. Is he ready, I ask.

‘We feel prepared, ready, confident in our position and what we’re going to do,’ he replies. ‘So much so that I’ve already set out not just the change I want over five or ten years of a Labour government – the big change – but also what are the first steps, because the public want to know what will be done the day after the election.

‘And the answer to that is sleeves rolled up, starting on the first steps in government.’

Starmer is already picturing a decade inside Downing Street. But as the disastrous Supermajority Strategy makes clear, so is Rishi Sunak.

He shouldn’t be surprised that the British people are becoming comfortable picturing it as well.