Keir Starmer used to be our MP and I have always had a soft spot for the blinking dafty ever since I wrote to him at the height of the antisemitic triumphalism of the Corbyn era. I warned him of the strength of feeling in our corner of north London, and suggested he be careful if he planned to come canvassing down our mews. Our elderly Jewish neighbour, like Starmer a keen Arsenal man, had put me on standby to run any Labour activists up the hill to Royal Free A&E should they take their chances by knocking on his front-door.

Pretty much everything is going the way of Labour’s new intake of mulish left-wing backbenchers

To his credit, Starmer replied to my email with more than boilerplate. He said he knew Labour had a big Jewish problem and that he was determined to sort it out, and even suggested we meet to discuss the matter over coffee. I rather churlishly put him off, for somehow I just couldn’t quite face sitting down with him for 45 minutes. Participants in focus groups who are asked which politician they would like to go for a pint with will know what I mean.

Now we know that Starmer’s determination to purge the party of Corbynite antisemitism was really part of the grand plan of that master tactician Morgan McSweeney to make Labour electable. McSweeney had seized upon Starmer as a handy empty vessel into which could be poured grown-up priorities, such as Stability, Competence, and Growth. First, Corbynism had to be discredited in all its manifestations, then Labour would be electable again after the May-Boris-Truss nightmare.

Starmer just about concealed his political cluelessness through the zombie general election campaign of 2024, crafted around a Labour manifesto that turned out to be the most dishonest political document since the Zinoviev letter.

Eighteen months and 13 U-turns later, we are told Starmer’s days are numbered. His ill-starred premiership looked briefly to have been under existential threat from Andy Burnham this weekend, following the Manchester Mayor’s showy attempted entry into the Gorton and Denton by-election. Burnham, the ultimate second-rate Blairite chancer, would surely have been found out in a northern cage fight with the likes of proper left-wing bruisers such as George Galloway and Zack Polanski.

But Starmer did not want to take the risk; the Prime Minister blocked Burnham from standing. In doing so, he may have killed off his Manchester rival’s short-term ambition of ousting him as PM, but he has made himself look weak and foolish.

Starmer’s personal approval ratings are a running joke. Football fans up and down the land chant ‘Starmer is a wanker’. When challenged, Wes Streeting is reported to have told Downing Street that he is not plotting for the boss’s job, just career planning, like the rest of the cabinet. The consensus of the informed pundits who flash across our television screens point to the Prime Minister’s inevitable removal after the coming calamity of the May elections.

I wish I were so confident. The Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, and Starmer’s political opponents on the left and right, are in danger of missing the point in their zeal to denounce him for his tin ear and the reactionary socialist policies that are being revived on his clueless watch.

But if you are one of those Labour MPs you hear on the radio intoning ‘I did not get into politics to cut the benefits of the most vulnerable or privatise our NHS’, then things are going rather well. Version One of Starmer-Reeves in the 2024 general election was all about competence and fiscal rules. But that is not how it turned out, not by a long chalk.

Pretty much everything is going the way of Labour’s new intake of mulish left-wing backbenchers who want to imagine that Thatcher never happened. Starmer’s government has tightened the grip of the teachers’ unions by knee-capping private schools with VAT, and clipping the wings of state-funded academies. Private landlords are in fire-sale retreat; labour relations laws are reverting to the 1970s, while the railways are back in full state ownership (without the government having the faintest plan for running them).

Pubs are closing down, but then landlords are all Tories or Reform, as are most of their regular drinkers. Non-doms are squeezing their broadest shoulders on to flights to Milan and Dubai, and good riddance. Muslim activists are to be mollified by a draconian attack on free speech.

Best of all, for the environmental and gender cultists, the North Sea is being shut down and Labour is obstructing implementation of the Supreme Court’s ruling on what is a woman. Meanwhile, we are drifting back to realignment with the EU. What’s not to like? Jeremy Corbyn could scarcely have dreamed of achieving all this had he squeaked home in 2019.

What’s not to like? Jeremy Corbyn could scarcely have dreamed of achieving all this had he squeaked home in 2019

But for the left, the greatest achievement of Starmerism will turn out to be the permanent expansion in the scale and spending of the state. Labour claimed it would raise a meagre £8 billion in new taxes to pay for its modernising programme. Then Rachel Reeves promptly produced two budgets, raising taxes by £66 billion.

These are monumental and almost certainly permanent shifts away from American and Asian economic growth norms towards the entrenched, sclerotic EU economic model. Good luck to Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage in trying to reverse this seismic shift, with a stagnant economy and ageing population.

Only conservatives are foolish enough to regard these Starmerite trends as politically unpopular. In narrow electoral terms, Labour has more to fear from the revitalised Greens and eccentric Lib Dems under Ed Davey, than from the Tories preaching fiscal continence.

If you are the owner of a small business, a farmer, a south of England home owner, someone on a decent salary being decimated by fiscal drag, or a young job-seeker with ambitions above your station, then this is depressing. But if you are an anonymous member of the current crop of Labour MPs, well, what’s not to like?

In their hearts they would love to see one of their own like Angela Rayner or Ed Miliband in Downing Street, rather than dreary Sir Keir. But why risk a ruck with the bond markets over a flashy firebrand like Angela, or a fight with the union funders over Ed in his mission to shut down what remains of British industry?

One senses Starmer would be much happier back in his natural environment, surrounded by prim, like-minded souls who are exercised most of all by the imperatives of international law. But how humiliating it would be for him to throw in the towel now. Come May, Starmer sceptics and enemies on the left will rally round and stick with him – because why risk things getting even worse?