Sir Keir Starmer at ‘The Jungle’ in France 10 years ago

WHEN people ask what Sir Keir Starmer, the Holborn and St Pancras MP, one of the politicians on our patch, is like, you have to step carefully.

He must be aware that his name can conjure up sharp contrasts.

In a world where only the angriest opinions clock the social media algorithms, people claim to actually hate him.

The definition of parody, meanwhile, is stretched to new limits by what mean things AI can do to a politician’s appearance in the name of caricature. It’s ok to wonder why anybody would put themselves in the public eye if they are going to be grokked into their underpants for a slop video, permitted by the tech companies as long as this bullying is labelled in small print as satire.

Converse to all the theatrical delight about his resignation this week, you will also hear over and again from national politicos and journalists about what a good man he is. In fact “he’s a good man, but…” has been the way to start any sentence in their Westminster cocoon for some time.

I did see the good man Starmer up close when we visited the refugee camp near Calais known as “The Jungle” together on a news assignment in 2016.

People were living in tents on a bog of excrement, struggling to stay warm or find enough to eat.

He showed compassion talking to both those who were stranded in this hellhole and the volunteers trying to improve their lives.

You never erase shantytown conditions like that from your memory, and we both agreed we’d hug our own children a little closer when we got home that night, such was the horror we had seen.

Many times Harrington has reflected on that day, as, all these years on, Mr Starmer has tried to tackle Nigel Farage by toughening up his narratives on boat crossings and detention centres, and all the rest.

Somebody in the Labour Party’s election team thought adding Union Jacks to their election posters would be convincing lion-like patriotism.

It all led to a clumsy mess when he accidentally said he wanted to get planes jetting people back to Bangladesh just before the 2024 election, but perhaps even better remembered was his “island of strangers” speech, instantly compared to Enoch Powell.

Sir Keir delivers a resignation speech outside Downing Street on Monday

By this point, it felt like politics, the machine and a cacophony of bad appointment advisers had deadened the edges of his own empathy.

This after all is man who used to save people in crowded death row jails in the Caribbean as a young crusading lawyer, and later helped take on the world’s most famous burger chain in the McLibel case.

Now the prime minister decided the best way to show his human side and that everybody has weaknesses was to share any regrets in profile pieces written by the devoutly loyal Tom Baldwin.

It was through these articles and Mr Baldwin’s dutiful tweets that we were meant to see the real man and his life at Downing Street, but it just read like comms-sanctioned hagiography.

Was it the real Keir or wasn’t it? Nobody could tell. The more he said “let me be clear” about something, the more foggy everything seemed to be.

How could any of us even start to define Starmerism? It is irony that after killing much of Labour’s left wing and repeatedly praising himself for changing the party that he is being ousted by someone who can get a load of MPs to stand behind him for a selfie while pledging a leftier direction.

Maybe the difficulty in learning what the man is really like lies in the possibility that Mr Starmer is no longer sure himself, not after the unique life led by anybody who becomes prime minister.

He’s had an army of idiots telling him what to say and what to think.

You can’t blame anybody for wanting to turn off the noise, and sometimes you wondered if he would love a magic button that could take him back to being unnoticed at an Arsenal game or able to walk to the pub in Kentish Town without being accosted about one grievance or another.

Harrington has had many interesting conversations with Mr Starmer over the years, and whenever it wasn’t about party politics that spark would be obvious.

If he had shown more of what he is like when he is relaxed, talking about football with his friends, the public might have been more drawn to him.

At the same time, it is a bit of a myth that his poll ratings were low simply because he couldn’t deliver a few more jokes.

Wit and repartee doesn’t mix so well with hardline fiscal rules and a failure to soothe the cost-of-living crisis, and after two years too many people felt they were worse off than they had been before.

The man who had shown so much concern for the children who had walked a continent to live without much hope in The Jungle, could now not bring himself to instantly bring hundreds of thous­ands of children living in poverty in the UK out of it at the first opportunity available to him.

Mr Starmer and his chancellor Rachel Reeves now celebrate the lifting of the two-child benefit cap but in truth they made families live another year of misery before they did.

That’s quite a journey from Calais.