Raf Baer

And so no wonder Labour MPs panicked.

Yeah, I think that really reinforced a sense generally of doubt about who Keir Starmer was, who his people were, what he really believed in.

It was so important for his self-image as prime minister in 2024 that he was a decent, honourable person.

And that was going to be culturally, ethically fair.

a fundamental rupture from the Tory era to then be, just by association, by proxy, bundled up with Jeffrey Epstein at a couple of removes, obviously.

It just meant, on top of everything else that had been going wrong, it was going to be impossible for him to ever appear in the public eye as a man of tremendous integrity.

Keir Starmer's poll ratings have been very, very low for quite a long time.

So I think a lot of people had essentially given up on the idea that he could do this job and he was good at it.

But in terms of what the damage that was done to him as prime minister, from which he could not recover.

essentially on the day that you were supposed to be launching a defence investment plan, saying this prime minister cannot make the necessary choices required to protect the country, to keep us safe.

There's no coming back from that.

It's very difficult to sell misery and cost of living crisis and ongoing malaise when you've promised change anyway.

It's particularly difficult to sell it if you're a terrible salesperson.

If there's no collective sense of what the enterprise is, if you're not balancing that pain with...

both a sense of where it's all going, but also a galvanizing idea of solidarity.

You're fermenting and churning the anger, the bitterness, the grievance that then boosts politicians who really feed on that stuff, particularly, obviously, Nigel Farage.

And so I think that Starmer's

big picture deficiency was not having that concept of what it was all for that meant that when Farage, when Reform UK really started surging in the polls, there wasn't a counter story about the kind of country we could be, something he could say to people who are interested in voting reform, who thought maybe reform was the only thing that was going to address their grievances.

Triumph is a strong word, but I think Ed Miliband's department, Energy and Climate Change, he has driven this forward quite hard and against a lot of opposition.

But actually, he stuck with his guns.