KEIR STARMER’S jokes at Labour conference were a bit cringe.  Some at the conference were better at delivering a line, but I was left scratching my head at the wit and wisdom of right-wing MP Conor McGinn, who is Labour’s deputy national campaign co-ordinator.

McGinn told the rally of Labour First, the right-wing Labour group he supports, that his “uncle was an Irish Labour Party councillor in Newry” who ran a store in a rural community. Towards the end of the 1960s McGinn’s uncle was approached by a salesman, a “sharp-suited young man” who was “extolling the virtues” of a “new-fangled concept called toothpaste.”

McGinn’s uncle took the salesman into the storeroom at the back of the shop and asked: “What do you see here?” The storeroom was piled high with unsold toilet rolls.

McGinn’s uncle told the salesman: “Son, they don’t clean their arses round here, they are hardly going to clean their teeth.”

McGinn said the moral of the story is to “know what we’re selling and know the people we are selling to” and “understand what they care about.” Charitably, McGinn was using a crude, if well-delivered, joke to get over a point.

But I couldn’t help think that the joker and his audience laughing about working people seeing toothpaste as a too-fancy luxury have a pretty bleak view of the electorate.