There comes a time, in the dying days of a relationship, when you start to become irritated merely by the sound of your partner’s breathing. It’s not kind, and it’s not necessarily rational, but it is what it is. Nothing they can do is going to fix it, and nothing they say makes it better – even if they suddenly start promising to do all the things you’ve been begging them to do for years. It all just seems too little, too late. And that is roughly where the parliamentary Labour party now finds itself with Keir Starmer.
His response to the bloodbath of last week’s local elections, in which he brought back Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman as advisers while promising something bigger and bolder than the creeping caution of the 2024 manifesto, was a promise to change aimed squarely at the MPs threatening to oust him and yet somehow it seems only to have deepened the frustration. Most would love nothing better than to get closer to Europe, as he promised; many have been screaming for months that, as he acknowledged, people are crying out for change to come faster. And the back-to-the-future appointments of two more New Labour veterans, to a team already groaning with survivors from the more successful 1997 to 2010 Labour governments, at least shows an understanding of where the plumbing is blocked.
