All political careers really do end in failure

There comes a moment for most prime ministers when a big public blunder takes their momentum away and from which they never really recover. But often it’s the little things that historians note as fatally eroding that sense of solidarity their governments depend on.

With Margaret Thatcher, the big one was the poll tax and subsequent riots, with John Major it was Black Wednesday and financial meltdown, with Tony Blair it was the Iraq war and with Gordon Brown it was the Great Crash. David Cameron had the Brexit referendum and Theresa May a record Commons defeat over her Brexit deal, hated by leavers and remainers alike, even if it was significantly less destructive than Boris Johnson’s disastrous exit deal. Johnson himself mismanaged the covid pandemic, Liz Truss rapidly unleashed economic mayhem and Rishi Sunak never really got going.

But behind the headlines there are usually fatal underminings of trust. Mrs Thatcher publicly embarrassed her foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe while Blair reneged on a deal with Gordon Brown to hand over power. Often it’s the quieter things that come back to bite.

Keir Starmer’s big bad moment looks as if it will have been the collapse of his welfare reforms, forgetting his vast Commons majority actually depends on individual Labour MPs, who really didn’t believe they were elected to smite the disabled.

Which makes Sir Keir’s continuing vendetta against his own back-benchers who dare to vote according to their consciences – and the party manifesto – so reckless, with ever more having the whip withdrawn.

Particularly petty is his treatment of Chris Hinchliff, the MP for North East Hertfordshire, who has made a principled stand in support of the planning system and of the natural world, against the Government’s attempts to ramp up even the previous Government’s onslaught on them.

Behind it all is the dead hand of the Treasury, ever more absurdly clinging to the view it’s held since the Barker reviews in the early 2000s that building fantasy numbers of houses would miraculously fix most of Britain’s economic problems and secure electoral triumph too. If England sinks under a sea of destructive, car-dependent, sprawl, it really doesn’t give a hoot.

Of course, there isn’t a cat-in-hell’s chance of the drive to smash up planning and environmental regulation securing the flood of new homes the Treasury – and the cloud of developer lobbyists around it – craves.

Angela Rayner knows that one-and-a-half million homes over the life of this Parliament belongs in fairyland, but it’s the sort of fairyland that eventually leads to politicians’ downfall.

Sir Keir and his increasingly delusional chancellor Rachel Reeves look sure to prove, as ever, that “all political careers end in failure”. Ms Rayner may have ambitions to be the one whom benefits, but her love-affair with the development lobby and increasingly fraught relationship with environmentalists could prove to be as big a guarantee of oblivion as Downing Street’s 1980s neoliberalism.

Jon Reeds