What a difference three months makes. When Starmer was first elected prime minister, you’d have thought, reading the broadsheets and surfing the TV-news channels, that he was God’s gift to politics. Hampstead gushed in celebration. Westminster lobby journalists were gripped by Starmermania. Caitlin Moran was literally aroused. Now the great and good have been confronted by the fact that Starmer and his team are, aside from anything else, really, really bad at this.

Most ordinary people already suspected as much, of course. Which is why a relatively small number of them voted for Labour. The ‘historic’ majority Starmer won in July was accomplished on the thinnest of mandates – a ‘landslide’ gifted to him by the quirks of our unrepresentative first-past-the-post electoral system and the self-immolation of the Tories. Not even reaching 34 per cent, Labour achieved the lowest vote share of any single-party majority government since the war. When turnout was taken into account, it turned out only around 20 per cent of the potential electorate actually voted for Starmer. No wonder his ‘honeymoon’ was nonexistent.

The slew of semi-scandals surrounding Labour wouldn’t necessarily be so damaging in and of themselves. The public know all too well that there are a lot of rich people circling around Westminster, and a lot of backstabbing schemers inside Westminster. They don’t like it, but it’s more or less priced in. Much more damning for the government is the scrapping of winter fuel payments and the mass release of prisoners. When paired with the ongoing crackdown on dissent, they reflect an alarming authoritarianism mixed with seriously warped priorities.

The problem is that, with no charisma or political vision to speak of, Starmer fell back, when in opposition, on a kind of pearl-clutching moralism. And it’s now biting him in his expensively trousered backside. Labour spent the past few years in a state of permanent, confected outrage, behaving as if no politician had ever lied before Boris Johnson, as if leaking had never happened before those feckless Tories, as if a PM being lent a holiday home by a wealthy friend spoke to a level of corruption that had hitherto only been seen in banana republics. Now Starmer is in power, and doing many of the same things, his disappointed-headmaster routine no longer washes.

The short memories of the commentariat on this front are staggering. Imagine believing that the Labour Party – the party of Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and the legendary Blair-Brown beef – would sweep into power and instantly banish lies, sleaze and backstabbing from Westminster. I can forgive the younger generation for not seeing through the hollow sanctimony of Labour. And I suppose the Labourite pundits can hardly be expected to be objective. But those who are actually paid to report on politics in a vaguely impartial fashion have already been badly exposed by this government, just as they were last time Labour was in power.

Many of the brickbats flying his way would probably bounce off Starmer if he actually had a coherent, popular vision for the country – something a substantial portion of voters were united behind. But he has no such thing. Historically, Starmer’s only consistent political conviction has been that he’d quite like to be prime minister. Now that he is prime minister, he looks like the proverbial dog who caught the car. He’s only a few months into this thing and he’s already doing the kind of mad, desperate and illiberal things – like banning smoking in beer gardens and pledging to weigh people in their workplaces – that a government usually does when it’s already on its way out, thrashing around for a legacy and being advised by all of the worst people.

Still, a man who believes in nothing can still do a hell of a lot of damage. And while Starmer has no principles to speak of, he seems intent on outsourcing them to the blob and assorted activists and leaning into every poisonous elite orthodoxy imaginable – from punishing eco-austerity to woke racialism. Indeed, at the election he pledged to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 and usher in a new Race Equality Act, which would institutionalise DEI under the guise of racial equality. Leaving the nation poorer, colder and more divided is hardly going to secure him in the public’s affections.

We’ve ended up with a prime minister who has no idea what he stands for and no idea what he’s doing – as inept as he is authoritarian. But is anyone actually surprised? Our ‘centrist’ elites were apparently so blinded by anti-Toryism, so deranged by Brexit, that they managed to convince themselves a dud was a giant.