That is hardly surprising. Of the 19 Labour leaders since the party's launch in 1906 under Sir Keir's namesake, Keir Hardie, only those three men have defeated a Conservative incumbent and become prime minister.

Mr Attlee remains the most venerated by his party. After serving as deputy prime minister in the wartime coalition government under Sir Winston Churchill, he beat him in the 1945 general election and put in place the foundations of the welfare state.

Those "days of hope" seem a long way removed from today's mood. The NHS is creaking, housing is in short supply, and Sir Keir and his chancellor Rachel Reeves miss no opportunity to say the cash will not be available to turn them around quickly.

Sir Keir is most comfortable comparing himself to Harold Wilson. Perhaps this is because Mr Wilson is remembered as a similarly stolid middle-aged figure.

That was not how Mr Wilson was seen in 1964 when Labour very narrowly ended "13 wasted years of Tory rule", as Sir Keir now seeks to do in 2024.

At that time, however improbably, Mr Wilson came across as a bit of a whiz kid, an Oxford don on course at the age of 46 to be the youngest prime minister of the 20th century.

He was a politician who "got" the Beatles, who were smashing hit parade records, and who promised to regenerate Britain through "the white heat of this revolution" in science and technology.

Today 61-year-old Sir Keir has no equivalent well of excitement or goodwill to draw on.

The best comparison for the task now facing the Labour leader is the one closest to him in time and the one that he was initially reluctant to embrace: Tony Blair in the run-up to the 1997 general election.

For the first years after he became Labour leader in 2019, Sir Keir avoided uttering the Blair B-word.

He had good reasons to keep his distance. He took over the leadership from the left of the party, having served in Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinet. He needed support from Corbynistas to be elected.

Besides, although Labour had lost three elections led successively by Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband and Mr Corbyn, Sir Tony, their last victor, had become anathema to many Labour supporters because of disillusionment over the war in Iraq.

Sir Keir shares no political lineage with Sir Tony - who incidentally trumped Mr Wilson as the youngest 20th-century prime minister, aged 43 when elected on 1 May 1997.

Sir Keir was a lawyer during the Blair years. His closest contact with New Labour probably came in 2008 when the Brown government appointed him director of public prosecutions.

Sir Keir only became an MP in 2015, seven years after Sir Tony retired from Westminster politics. He took over the Holborn and St Pancras constituency from Frank Dobson, Sir Tony's first health secretary.

Since then the gravitational pull of New Labour has exerted itself, pulling Sir Keir to the centre, just as Labour has risen in opinion polls and local elections to its present commanding lead.

It is difficult to imagine Mr Corbyn or Mr Miliband donning camouflage, as Sir Keir did recently on a pre-Christmas visit to British troops on active deployment in Eastern Europe.

As Sir Keir has assembled his team for the election campaign, veterans of the Blair and Brown governments have returned to important roles although most of the politicians and advisors around the leader of the opposition are from a new and younger generation.

In the shadow cabinet, rising stars including Wes Streeting, Peter Kyle, Liz Kendall and Jonathan Reynolds make no secret of their admiration for the achievements of the last Labour government.

Shadow chancellor Ms Reeves says her model has been the late Alistair Darling, who served all through the premierships of Sir Tony and Mr Brown.

Yvette Cooper was a minister during those years in power, so were Hilary Benn, recently appointed shadow Northern Ireland secretary, Pat McFadden, who is heading the election campaign team, and shadow defence secretary John Healey.

Former cabinet minister Douglas Alexander is hoping to resurrect his political career by standing again for election in Scotland.

There are also influential figures in the backroom of the Starmer machine with real experience of being in government.

Peter Hyman was an advisor to Sir Tony and has returned to work for Sir Keir after a decade out of politics as an innovative comprehensive school founder and head.

Matthew Doyle, a former press secretary for Sir Tony, is now Sir Keir's communications director.

David Evans, the secretary general of the Labour Party, was a deputy general secretary in the Blair years. Other top aides and campaign veterans dating from that era are Carol Linforth and Mariana Triam.

Peter Mandelson, the politician, and Alastair Campbell, the spin doctor, are also ready to offer their advice.

So is Sir Tony himself, although he has made it clear that he does not hanker after a David Cameron-style return to frontline UK politics.

When asked about a job for Sir Tony, Sir Keir doesn't sound keen on the idea either.

In 1997, New Labour transformed British election campaigning with its famous pledge card, which set out five specific promises on taxation, young offenders, class sizes, welfare and NHS waiting lists.

Its talismanic influence is evident in that Sir Keir has already laid out his "five missions", while the Conservative leader Rishi Sunak outlined his "five pledges" for 2023.

At least three of Sir Keir's missions are in the same policy areas as New Labour's, designed to appeal to the main concerns of voters on the NHS, crime, and "barriers to opportunity", alongside the topical issues of housebuilding and green energy.

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Ms Reeves has also refreshed the old pledge not to put up headline taxes and has stressed that Labour is once again pro-private enterprise.

Three of former chancellor Mr Sunak's pledges were economic, along with cutting the waiting lists and stopping the boats. So far he has only fulfilled one of them - halving the rate of inflation.

The promises from both main parties are much vaguer than those on Sir Tony's original pledge card and they have been announced prematurely. New Labour only brought out the detail of what it wanted to be measured against once the general election had been called.

In some ways Sir Keir and Mr Sunak are fighting the last war with their five promises. The public long ago lost interest in such stunts, not least because Sir Tony is remembered as a charismatic salesman who got away with a lot.

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In the Christmas period before the 1997 general election period, Sir Tony's main media appearance was on the Des O'Connor show. He fretted about it in advance but thanked Alastair Campbell for setting it up afterwards because it cut through to the general public.

Since then politicians have been there and done that with diminishing returns.

Sir Keir may be embracing Blairite policies but he is the anti-charisma candidate.

Unlike Mr Sunak he does not hobnob with celebrities such as Elon Musk.

Sir Keir's new year launch is already billed as a series of speeches around the country about the issues facing us all.

Serious, even boring, but in tune with the spirit of the age.

He may not be doing much for his personal ratings but his lack of profile has not done the Labour Party's chances any harm.

Could Clement Attlee be the closest comparison - after the man now widely hailed as Labour's greatest prime minister was once popularly dismissed as "a modest man with much to be modest about".