While the polls continue to predict a Labour victory at the next election, it’s not all rosy for Sir Keir Starmer. It transpires that his Labour party is still struggling to make a dent in the public consciousness. When quizzed on the big personalities at the top of the Labour Party, the good people of Great Britain weren’t particularly bowled over. In fact, polling for Times Radio found that one of Starmer’s more popular MPs was, er, entirely made-up.

The general public appears to be rather in the dark about who makes up Keir Starmer’s top team. Almost half of all respondents felt that they knew the fabricated frontbencher Fiona Wilson MP better than several real shadow cabinet ministers. It’s a little awkward for shadow culture secretary Thangam Debbonaire and shadow Cabinet Office minister Nick Thomas-Symonds, who ranked below their fake colleague in the findings. Meanwhile 15 per cent went as far as saying they felt favourably towards the fictional parliamentarian, making ‘Fiona Wilson’ more popular than a number of senior Labour party figures, including shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson and Labour veteran Pat McFadden.

The results weren’t especially dazzling for the Tories, either. Though there was greater public awareness of more of Rishi Sunak’s top team — the Tories had a ‘Big Seven’ group of which awareness was over 65 per cent compared to Labour’s ‘Big Six’ — the Conservative brand is so damaged that a fictional Tory minister ‘Henry Thorpe’ received a negative favourability rating of -5. It still ranked him higher than other actual ministers, however, including Jeremy Hunt, James Cleverly and even the Prime Minister. Ouch…

It’s a rather poor reflection of how both major parties have managed to appeal (or not) to the public. It’s never a good look when made-up ministers are polling better than their real-life counterparts…