This narrow, win-at-all-costs strategy could take Labour to victory, but not to power

‘Keir Starmer says he wants to fix things, not theorise. But fix what, for whom and how?’ Photograph: Jacob King/PA

How can a party be convincingly leading the polls and still appear so weak? Labour may be 17 points ahead but it continues to behave with all the nervousness of unwelcome gatecrashers at a party.

Here it does no good to be unfair. On some impressive and yet rather cynical scale Labour has worked miracles. It has come back from the dead much quicker than anyone expected. Keir Starmer was meant to be the bridge for the eventual return of Blairite true believers. Under the temporary cloak of Corbynism-without-Corbyn, the plan was not to win but to snatch the party back – a first step, and one that counted on another electoral failure as an inevitability, given the scale of Labour’s 2019 loss.