Ingurland football shirts, pork pies, Ross Kemp. Downing Street’s special St George’s Day reception yesterday really had it all – summing up the cringey, deracinated, centrist-dad vision of patriotism that our flag-bothering prime minister Keir Starmer appears desperate to inflict on a bemused nation.

Having spent the best part of five years bringing his own Union flag to practically every public engagement, desperate to overcome Labour’s Corbyn-minted reputation as a full-blown threat to national security, Starmer was keen to hug the St George’s Cross close yesterday. No10 was decked out in red-and-white bunting. In his short address to assorted well-wishers, Starmer dubbed himself a ‘proud Englishman’.

As the great comic writer Graham Linehan has observed of Starmer, the PM is the master of ‘tell, don’t show’ – the inverse of the scriptwriting rule of ‘show, don’t tell’. His words always speak louder than his actions and his words aren’t all that loud to begin with. Such is Starmer’s desperation to overcome the sense that he is an out-of-touch London lawyer who would sooner die in a ditch for the ECHR than Merrie England, he feels the need to constantly tell us he’s patriotic in a way that only leaves you more suspicious. Like someone shouting ‘I am a good person’, or ‘I am not a sex offender’.

So, what makes Starmer proud to be English, then? You’ll be unsurprised to learn it all starts with Euro 96: the Year Zero for centrist-dad patriotism, only recently supplanted by the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. (Starmer was ‘there at Wembley’, apparently.) What was once derided as 90-minute patriotism is apparently all today’s English metropolitan elites have to draw on.