Is the Keir Starmer Cabinet a government of adults, or a collection of college activists who have never grown up?

The new Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, accused the Prime Minister outright of being a student politician during their first Commons clash last week, and the jibe seemed to hit home.

It is not just that the Labour Government has been entangled in avoidable scandals because so many of its members were too immature – and so easily seduced by offers of luxury goods, free tickets and other shiny gifts.

It is that their view of the world still seems to be a sort of teenage spasm of wrath and self-righteousness, rather than mature statecraft.

Simple-minded anti-Americanism is a big part of adolescent Leftism, and the rise of Donald Trump has undoubtedly led to more of this. Yet this is hardly the way for serious political operators to behave.

What we (and the Americans) say in public is always going to be different from what we say in private. Mr Trump probably does not think all that highly of Sir Keir, but he was still ready to entertain him to dinner in his tower in New York.

Many Cabinet members must have realised years ago that they might one day occupy high office. They also must have known a White House return by Mr Trump was on the cards. Yet they went on record with rude personal attacks on him.

These have generally not been reasoned criticisms but name-calling and personal remarks, some even about the President-elect’s hair or his physical stature. The Foreign Secretary, supposedly our chief diplomat, is among the worst offenders. Yet he is not a novice.

He was appointed to the Privy Council (generally a sign of seniority and trust) in 2008 and held a number of offices under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. So why did he not know better than to publicly refer to Mr Trump as a ‘neo-Nazi’ (amongst other things) as recently as 2018?

Now The Mail on Sunday reveals that Sir Keir, in June 2020, wrote a letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson in which he attacked the US authorities’ response to the Black Lives Matter protests which followed the police killing of George Floyd. He asked Mr Johnson to ensure that UK exports were not being used for the ‘suppression of democratic rights’.

It was perfectly possible to deplore the shocking death of George Floyd without embracing the hard-Left ideology of BLM. But Labour chose to do so.

This was a few days before Sir Keir and his deputy, Angela Rayner, ‘took the knee’, publishing a picture of themselves doing so and saying ‘We kneel with all those opposing anti-Black racism. #BlackLivesMatter.’

This sort of thing is all very well among students and activists. But in a party of government, it is quite different. Governments have to deal, often face to face, with foreign rulers with less than perfect records.

The Foreign Office repeatedly asked the late Queen, and now King Charles, to be polite to all kinds of despots, so horrible, repressive, bloodstained and dishonest that they make Mr Trump look like John F. Kennedy or Abraham Lincoln by comparison.

Noses are held, false smiles are exchanged, and necessary deals are done to maintain prosperity and security in a hard world, where we must survive on our wits and nobody owes us a living.

The presidents of student unions, or figures such as Jeremy Corbyn MP, are free to shout slogans, wave clenched fists and demand embargoes – because they do not matter. If Sir Keir and his Cabinet wish to matter, they are going to have to learn to button their lips instead of taking to their knees.