(Read on, or view here: https://youtu.be/NRsOaLp3wvM)
As the world holds its breath, fearful of hostilities in the Middle East spiralling from crisis to catastrophe, Sir Keir Starmer continues to wonder how best to wrest back control here in Britain. As our Political Correspondent Peter Spencer reports, no one can dispute that he’s been having a pretty rocky ride.
One-time Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s headline-grabbing response to the resignations of his Chancellor and other top people was a triumph of understatement.
But Starmer’s problems with accepting perhaps too many freebies, and having to unruffle too many feathers among his top team, are in comparison ever such little local difficulties.
It’s all part of facing up to another brilliant line, this one from former New York Governor Mario Cuomo: ‘Campaign in poetry, govern in prose.’
The Prime Minister’s trip to Brussels last week was a classic case in point. Of course sorting Britain’s surly post-Brexit relations with a vital trading partner did no one any favours.
But just being nice to the folk running the European Union was only a beginning. Turning warm words into tangible results will take years of toing and froing.
The same applies to sorting our crumbling public services, like health, welfare, education and the legal and prisons systems. Likewise getting all those promised new homes actually built. And tilting towards net zero.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s announcement last week about turning dirty waste into clean fuel played well, same as his plans to draw private investment into generating home-grown green energy.
Worth noting in passing that after fourteen years in the wilderness, Labour’s short on ministers who’ve actually done the job. Miliband’s one of the few, and it shows.
Though as a former Director of Public Prosecutions Starmer has experience in running a department, it wasn’t particularly political.
And this lack of savvy has been uncomfortably on display ever since he made it to Number Ten.
The bushy-browed Labour Chancellor of yesteryear Denis Healey was fond of saying: ‘When you’re in a hole, stop digging.’ But Starmer hasn’t got the hang of that.
And annoyingly, he seems to be onto a loser every which way in regard to the gifts he’d probably have been better off not accepting in the first place.
Now that he’s given some of them back it looks to his critics like an admission of guilt, even though everything was in fact above board. It’s also a problem for colleagues, who’ve got no idea whether to do the same.
The reason why it’s played so badly, judging by opinion polls that show the new government’s support tanking, is that so many of us are feeling the pinch. Cutting the winter fuel allowance hasn’t helped.
And all this as a budget looms, in which the Chancellor Rachel Reeves has made no secret of her plans to whack up taxes and cut spending.
Of course she’ll heap blame on Tory laxity and incompetence. And while economists disagree on their exact level of culpability, voters did give them an historic thumbs down at the election.
But a problem Starmer et al will face is how long it’ll be before those same voters won’t count that bit and turn on them instead.
So much easier being in opposition saying the government’s rubbish than being the government – stuck with putting things right.
On top of that there’s the punters’ unprecedented tendency to change their minds.
Time was when British politics was pretty tribal. People knew which lot they liked, and stuck with it through thick and thin.
Now, as the July election so clearly showed, everything’s up for grabs. Vis that huge chunk of true-blue Tories switching to Nigel Farage’s Reform party. If they flipped back, Labour’s lead would largely evaporate.
The title of a seminal novel by the Czech author Milan Kundera springs to mind here: The book of laughter and forgetting.
Certainly not forgetting that her side’s support was more a loan than a gift, Ms Reeves is likely to cut herself a bit of slack by changing the way the Treasury does its sums, thus putting billions into her kitty.
Even there though, she’ll have to square things with the city first, to head off the danger of the moneybags taking fright, like they did when Liz Truss tried to do things her way.
It’s very unlikely it’ll come to that because, as a former Bank of England economist herself, the Chancellor is widely respected in the right circles. And does know how to use a calculator.
Not that Truss is exactly contrite about her efforts. Any more than Tory members seem to be troubled by the ever so large local difficulty she got the country into during her short stint in the top job.
Cue the Conservative party conference that wound up last week.
No one there seemed much interested in talking about things that trouble everyone else, like broken public services, the shortage of homes for people and the cost of living.
But they exploded with delight when Ms Truss told them they’d have done ever so much better if she was still their leader.
This from a woman who came within a gnat’s of wrecking the economy, and indeed lost her own seat in the highest ever swing from Conservative to Labour.
Meanwhile, as the four contenders for Rishi Sunak’s job did exactly what he told them not to – that’s to say get antsy with one another – they’ll be shortlisted by MPs to just two this week.
After that it’ll fall to the grassroots members to pick the lucky winner. Those same folk, let’s remember, who originally preferred Truss to Sunak.
Whatever else may be said of the man, he did make a reasonable fist of untangling the mess left by Ms Truss. Which says rather a lot about those Tory members’ judgement.
Certainly, while the Labour get-together a couple of weeks back was rather a dismal affair, one line from the Blair era did seem to resonate when the Conservatives’ turn came.
‘You go to Labour conference and wonder why you voted Labour,’ it goes. ‘Then you arrive at Tory conference and remember.’
Still, when it comes to getting back from the wilderness, anything’s possible.
Take dear little Rayne Beau, a spectacularly enterprising pussy cat, who got lost for two whole months when he got separated from his California-based owners during a camping holiday in a national park.
The heartbroken couple eventually had to leave without him, convinced they’d never see him again.
All that changed last month when they got a call from a pet-tracking service, who’d been handed the poor, decidedly under-the-weather looking creature and read his microchip.
Everybody ever so happy then.
And ok, he hadn’t managed to make it all the way home under his own steam. But he had somehow travelled a long way in the right direction.
How long exactly? Eight. Hundred. Miles. Love his style!
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