Keir Starmer needs to find his own Guilty Men

This is a week of bittersweet anniversaries for the Labour party. It is now 72 years since Clement Attlee’s government created the National Health Service, its most popular achievement. It is also 75 years since Attlee led the party to its first ever landslide victory, a triumph that made the NHS possible. But if these memories warm the hearts of Labour members they should be cooled by the realisation that their party is some way from even scraping back into office, let alone marching into power armed with a manifesto as radical as ‘Let Us Face the Future’, which rejected pre-war poverty and laissez-faire economics and embraced a new world of greater equality and state intervention.

Under Keir Starmer Labour appears to be going in the right direction, but it still lags some way behind the Conservatives in the polls. The Labour leader has, however, been getting rave reviews for his weekly dissection of Boris Johnson at Prime Minister’s Questions, which has exposed various lapses in the government’s handling of the Covid crisis.