A new Netflix documentary tells the extraordinary story of Apollo 13, the spacecraft that almost never returned from its trip to the moon, focusing on how the families of the three astronauts coped with the nerve-wracking tension of their journey home, which was witnessed by millions of people around the world.

A 1995 film starring Tom Hanks as mission captain Jim Lovell (still alive today at 96) captured the drama brilliantly. Something similar is currently happening to the two stranded astronauts aboard the International Space Station. They had embarked on an eight-day journey, but due to an equipment failure, they will not return until next February at the earliest and will apparently be rescued by Elon Musk.

Their predicament isn’t getting the same media coverage as Apollo 13 in 1970. Maybe we trust that they’ll be brought back so it’s not a matter of life and death: Some experts gave Lovell and his crew a five percent chance of getting home. Or maybe we’re just not as interested in space travel as we once were.

But Hanks remains fascinated by the Apollo missions and provides the voiceover for a fascinating cinema experience called The Moonwalkers at the Lightroom in London’s King’s Cross.

I took my grandson and found the footage strangely moving, especially the recording of John F. Kennedy’s 1962 speech that began the adventure. During a visit to Rice University in Houston, Texas, he promised that America would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. “We have chosen to go to the moon and do the other things in this decade, not because they are easy, but because they are difficult… We are setting sail on this new sea because there are new knowledges to be gained and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the advancement of all people.”

The speech was largely written by his advisor Ted Sorensen and was full of ambitions, hopes and visions that are rarely heard from politicians today.

Kennedy had his flaws, as we later learned, but he embodied and articulated a can-do spirit that we rarely see today—and not just in America. As you get older, there’s always the danger of falling into a Gilded Age mythology that the politicians of yesteryear were bigger personalities, smarter, and more ambitious.

But when Sir Keir Starmer delivered his much-watched speech in the Downing Street garden, he was once again reminded of the Lilliputian nature of the modern political leader. What was he after? He had set out the programme for government in the King’s Speech last month, so why not just go ahead and implement it?

Sir Keir made the silly claim that his government had achieved more in seven weeks than the last government had achieved in seven years. But in reality it has achieved nothing – and why in such a short space of time? Just because organisations like Great British Railways have been set up doesn’t mean that trains run on time.

One of the main reasons for the loss of trust between the public and their political leaders is the failure to keep promises. Sir Keir says he will change, but we will not know until we see the results. If he tells us now that things will get worse before they get better, he is asking us to trust that he will turn his rhetoric into action. Let him make that speech in three or four years’ time, when we can judge for ourselves.

The Prime Minister’s style is marked by a certain arrogance, a naive willingness to give hostages to fate, without realising that he will find his task much more difficult than he seems to realise. Even his majority of over 170 votes in the House of Commons will not be secure if voters believe they have once again been sold a pig in a poke. As we can see across Europe, the traditional parties are being targeted for power grabs or ousted by populists.

Sir Keir may have this threat in mind when he talks about doing things differently, although it is not clear what that means. Unless he has some major constitutional reform in his pocket, he will continue to govern as all his predecessors have done, namely through a Cabinet and a Parliament.

He also says there will be no more “government by performance” and yet today’s walk through the Rose Garden was nothing but performance? Sir Keir is right. Things do indeed need to be done differently. The NHS needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, as does the welfare state, and both will bankrupt the country on the current trajectory. But he gave no indication that he is thinking along those lines, no ambition, no inspiration, just an oft-repeated canard about a £22 billion black hole in the government budget and how difficult everything is going to be.

In reality, there will be no major changes, only more suffering for the wealthy, who raise the lion’s share of the revenue to fund the social programs on which Labour will spend even more money while avoiding the radical reforms needed.

We didn’t know how bad things were, he said – which isn’t true, because he campaigned on the basis that everyone was bad. Sir Keir wants us to expect more from him, that he is a man of integrity who gets things done, not another mediocre man who promises a lot but doesn’t deliver.

Maybe we’ll get the politicians we deserve. As social philosopher Thomas Sowell put it, “The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection of themselves but also a reflection of ourselves. When people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy them.”

When Kennedy delivered his speech in 1962, the Western world was in a mood of post-war optimism, but one that was tempered by the threat of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. The Apollo mission was part of this geopolitical and ideological struggle, but it was still a major undertaking that the Americans achieved.

Today, everything seems so isolated and technocratic by comparison, even though we are on the verge of another great leap forward with artificial intelligence. We need political leaders who can look to these new horizons. I don’t think we have one in Downing Street, do we?