When he does go, what will the political death certificate give as the true cause of Keir Starmer’s demise? It won’t be the Peter Mandelson scandal, the policy U-turns or the bleak nights at provincial counting centres. All these are symptoms, not the disease. No, what is turning the guy elected just 19 months ago into an ex-prime minister is the slow realisation among ministers, colleagues and voters of one essential truth about the man: there is less to him than meets the eye.
His promises get shrunk in the wash. A green new deal is jettisoned, an Employment Rights Act has a large watering can poured over it, a bold manifesto pledge to end Britain’s feudal leasehold laws suddenly grows caveats.
The same goes for his claimed achievements, a modest puddle that in sunlight swiftly evaporates. Just listen to his cabinet ministers this week, mouthing hostage-video messages of their boss’s achievements: a roll-call that begins with extended childcare – actually one of the last deeds of Rishi Sunak – and scrapping the two-child benefit cap, forced on No 10 by Labour backbenchers.
In this land of vanished crafts and endangered trades, there did arise recently a nice cottage industry of de
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