Keir Starmer’s problems are of his own making

That nobody in Keir Starmer’s inner circle worked out that trashing his personal reputation for a hundred grand’s worth of free stuff was a bad deal tells us a lot. Worse still, nobody seems even to have clocked that accepting so many freebies, especially from the ambitious Labour peer Lord Alli, could prove politically toxic – even though Starmer in opposition had frequently lambasted the likes of Boris Johnson for filling his own boots. On top of that, apparently no one had an issue with giving the right-wing media a free hit on the Prime Minister’s wife for the sake of £5,000 worth of clothes and personal shopping advice.

The Achilles’ heel of modern leftism – a belief that the innate moral superiority of its tenets and personnel is so obvious as to render both above suspicion – is clearly present in abundance in this Labour prime minister and his team.