Keir Starmer needs a reshuffle to win back the Blue Wall

The most important fact about British politics is also the most mundane: the next general election is an awfully long way off.

Given the extraordinary events we are living through, it is sometimes tempting to forget this and to suppose that a big political moment in any given week is going to have transformative consequences.

I have previously referred to outbreaks of this syndrome as flare-ups of ‘that bloke who drove to Durham that time’. This is in honour of all those pundits and MPs (including Tories) who claimed, ridiculously, that the Dominic Cummings saga was a game-changer that was bound to feature as a top cause of voter outrage with the government come the next election.

In fact, we all need to slow down. After living through an Italianate cycle of general elections every other year and governments being formed by coalitions, quasi-coalitions or wafer-thin majorities, we now have a single party administration founded on a very large Commons majority.