I am going to startle all Speccie readers by declaring upfront my unbounded admiration for Prime Minister Sir (for a knight he is) Keir Starmer. No, really, just bear with me and hear me out. Sanctimonious Starmer had climbed so high up his own moral horse that long ago he lost sight of the economic, social and political realities on the ground. In consequence, demonstrating Olympic quality skill of political gymnastics, he finds himself in the sewer.

His impressive accomplishment is that the depth of disenchantment and contempt that the Tories managed to achieve in 14 years of missed opportunity, Labour has achieved in a mere 14 weeks. In an opinion poll published in the Observer on Sunday, Starmer’s popularity had plunged to its lowest level ever. Even before the Labour party conference, its first in government in 15 years, the previous weekend had seen him record a net favourability rating of minus 26 (24 to 50 per cent approval/disapproval), a drop of 45 points since the July election. On Sunday it fell another four points to minus 30. For a party back in power after 14 years with a massive majority, that takes some skill.

Starmer had early on established the phenomenon of two-tier policing, justice and governance in public consciousness. In recent weeks he has consolidated the government’s reputation for sleaze and heartlessness. On the one hand, Labour has targeted the winter fuel payment for cutting back state subsidies that will hit nearly three million pensioners over 80. On the other hand, junior doctors and train drivers have been awarded huge wage rises that are driving demands from other public sector unions while the ideologically driven net-zero obsession is raising energy costs to leave the UK with the highest electricity prices in the world for industrial business. Remember, significantly more people die from extreme-weather cold than heat.

The sheer stupidity of some of the economic policies and their perverse consequences has put the government on a steep learning curve in public economics. The 20 per cent VAT on private school fees will price the children from working class families out of the best of British schools, perpetuating inter-generational elitism. Ending tax breaks for wealthy foreigners living in the UK was originally forecast to raise £3.2 billion in extra revenue. Revised figures show it will lose £1 billion and more instead as the multimillionaires – who by definition are among the most internationally mobile – flee abroad and take their money with them. Starmer wants the state to take more control of people’s lives and investigators to be empowered to spy on personal bank information, .

But worse, far worse, has been the stench of corruption enveloping the senior leadership of the party in government, with the munificence of Lord Alli being particularly malodorous. He bought £35,000 worth of clothing and designer spectacles for Keir and £5,000 worth for Victoria Starmer. The Starmers have enjoyed free hospitality at some elite sporting events and concerts. Lord Alli lent his £18 million penthouse in Covent Garden to the Starmers in June and July so their 16-year old son could study in solitude. The penthouse was also used by Starmer for a Covid-era broadcast urging people to work from home.

Dale Vince, another big donor to Labor, wants the government to lift the legal requirement for children to be served meat in their schools. His company Devil’s Kitchen already supplies vegan food to one in every four schools. Clearly, he has ambitions to capture more of the school catering market.

The double standards and hypocrisy extend to Starmer’s top aide. In opposition, Labour waxed eloquent against the sub-£145,000 salary paid to Johnson’s chief of staff Dominic Cummings. But when Starmer’s chief Sue Grey – whose switch to Starmer’s office from the public sector as ethics czar was criticised for impropriety – is revealed to have a salary of £170,000, which is £3,000 more than the PM’s salary, Starmer harrumphs that the remuneration of his staff should not be the subject of public debate. Er, Prime Minister, her salary is being paid by the taxpayers.

And then there’s David Lammy as Foreign Secretary, one of the great offices of state. He appeared on Celebrity Mastermind in 2015. In the sub-three minutes general knowledge segment, he said that Marie Antoinette won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 for research into radiation (it was Marie Curie) and that Henry VIII was succeeded by Henry VII (indicating innumeracy as well as historical ignorance); confused the Palace of Versailles for the Bastille; and mixed up Georgia with Yugoslavia (and, implicitly, the Caucasus with the Balkans).

Lammy also has a history of tweeting insults of Donald Trump (e.g. a ‘neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath’) who has an even chance of being president come January. He justifies Starmer’s clothing freebies by saying the opposition leader lacked public funds for his wardrobe.

He describes Azerbaijan’s seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia as a liberation even as he has suspended some arms exports to Israel for its actions in Gaza. Perhaps it’s not surprising then that he believes climate change is a ‘more fundamental threat’ than terrorism. I wonder what the likes of America’s Antony Blinken, Russia’s Sergey Lavrov, India’s S. Jaishankar and China’s Wang Yi, every one of them a sophisticated interpreter of all they perceive on the international landscape, make of their British counterpart?

As opposition leader, Starmer often droned on about Johnson’s partygate and gold wallpaper scandals. That’s why the ballooning scandal of the freebies of his cabinet is so politically damaging. The overall conclusion has to be that the old saying that if it were not for double standards, the left would have no standards at all has a lot to commend it. This means that the mind-boggling majority notwithstanding, it’s not inconceivable that Two-Tier Keir could become One-Term Starmer. Left-wing MP Diane Abbott has publicly criticised Starmer for being ‘in the pocket of millionaires’. And women’s rights-cum-gender-critical MP Rosie Duffield has resigned from Labour in disgust at the ‘off the scale’ ‘sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice’ and ‘cruel policies’ of the party. Given the disarray and disunity in the Tories, opportunity beckons for Reform and Nigel Farage to dominate the centre-right political space in the UK.