Since becoming Prime Minister, Starmer – despite receiving world-class advice from Blair – has lurched from crisis to crisis and now trails in polls behind Nigel Farage’s Reform UK to the extent where an election today would lose Labour around 267 seats. These crises are chiefly of his own making and they stem largely from failing to see through the courage of his convictions. Every time it looks as if The Dark Lord has steadied the ship, as it did back in March, Starmer proceeds, with breathtaking incompetence, to undo any gains. After a disastrous start in Number 10, which led to the dismissal of Sue Grey, Starmer looked to be turning course. We might even question the wisdom of that. Let us take Southport, Starmer came out loudly against a largely illusory ‘far right’, cutting an authoritarian, if brittle figure, but then failed to follow this course through. He largely dropped this rhetoric after the departure of Grey, and seemed to u-turn entirely by delivering the historic ‘Islands of Strangers’ speech. There were other u-turns: on the touted outdoor smoking ban, and on the hugely unpopular Winter fuel allowances. Starmer stuck to his guns on the hateful VAT levied on private schools (the worst kind of leftist resentment politics) and the (also basically hateful) inheritance taxes levied on farmers. Still, agree or disagree with these policies, out of five areas, Starmer seemed to buckle in three.

Of course, we know that these changes were largely down to Grey’s replacement as chief Svengali by Morgan McSweeney and his ‘Blue Labour’ project. McSweeney was trying to present Labour as a non-woke, patriotic, small ‘c’ socially conservative party committed to security and strong borders, daring to take the party even further to the right than it had ever been under Blair. Starmer, now being steered largely by McSweeney, tried to put the memory of the Southport and Winter fuel debacles behind him. He tried to appear the statemen by leading the Western world against Russia in the ongoing war against Ukraine, even if his ‘coalition of the willing’ failed to materialise.

Things, at least by the incredibly low standards of this government, and if only for a month or two, were going reasonably well. But then, Starmer lost his nerve. Blair whose presence looms ominously whenever he’s actually in the country, went off to Davos, the Middle East, India, and so on, as part of his other job of running the entire world. Starmer, without Blair there to babysit him, failed to isolate and punish ‘the Soft Left’, or, if you prefer Brownites, who still taint his cabinet. The clownish Ed Miliband is still there, for example – a stronger Prime Minister would have long ago banished him to the back benches. The inability of Starmer to tame these malign forces in the Labour Party has now resulted in a full-scale rebellion against him over his planned welfare cuts. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, was said to be in tears. Starmer has had to perform yet another humiliating u-turn, and has made compromises that nullify the bulk of what he was planning to save. Even after the compromises, today Starmer will face further rebellion as Labour MPs are set to defy the leader, despite all the powers of the whip threatened. It’s honestly pathetic: ‘Weak! Weak! Weak!’

To add insult to injury, Starmer is lashing out at suggestions that McSweeney is running the show at Number 10, thereby throwing his most trusted advisor under the bus and damaging the Blue Labour project. In interviews, he is now trying to disown the ‘Islands of Strangers’ speech, in yet another u-turn. The government has tried to compensate for its brief bout of patriotism by spending the last couple of weeks promoting nonsensical Windrush mythology. Starmer does not seem to know what he is doing from one week to the next. Blair’s advice – pick a course, stick to it, face down those who don’t like it – is not followed. Instead, Starmer loudly picks a course, then turns about face when some people don’t like it, then turns about face again. It is the model of what not to do as a leader. He seems somehow at once both impulsive and indecisive. Given his total lack of charisma, Starmer’s only shot of making a success of his premiership was to appear the strongman, to lean into his authoritarian streak, his lack of humanity, and be a kind of immovable rock. Now that image is shattered. Because of this constant chopping and changing, an attempt to appeal to everyone, he ends up appealing to no one. I sometimes wonder if James O’Brien is the only person in Britain who actually supports Keir Starmer. I have seen popularity ratings as low as 16% for him, one wonders if there is any bottom. In the space of a year, he has alienated young people, old people, farmers, people on welfare, millionaires, the self-employed, business owners, parents who send their kids to private schools, basically anyone who relies on energy (which is to say everyone), pro-Palestine leftists, pro-Israel rightists, anti-war people, anti-Trump people, anti-immigration people, pro-immigration people, pub landlords, the list is literally endless. Starmer is such a disaster that now, people are openly talking about something only myself and a few friends were half-joking about a few months ago, which is the prospect of Prime Minister, Angela Rayner. All of this is a shame: Starmer could have been a sensible and centred leader. McSweeney had basically the right ideas. Now one fears that whole project is over.