Is Keir Starmer going to blow it?

When Boris Johnson won his eighty-seat majority, Labour looked to be destined to spend a decade or so in the political wilderness. But ‘Partygate’, the eventual defenestration of Boris plus the psychodrama of Truss and the fraught first year of Sunak meant that the tables turned. All of a sudden, dreary Keir Starmer – with his cardboard hair and his voice like the recently recreated Aztec death whistle, said to be ‘somewhere between a spooky gust of whistling wind and the scream of a thousand corpses’ – was not the lame duck Kinnockesque caretaker. Labour’s leader became the shoo-in next PM.

Now the numbers seem to be shifting again. A poll this week revealed that Labour’s lead has shrunk to just ten points over the Tories. Sunak’s party now has 29 per cent of the vote share, compared to Labour’s 39 per cent. And I’m starting to wonder: is Starmer actually subconsciously – or maybe even consciously – trying to lose?

Over the last two or three weeks, he has dropped a series of anvils on his own feet and scored several remarkable goals right into the back of his own net.