Appearing before MPs yesterday, Keir Starmer bemoaned the “consultations, regulations [and] arms-length bodies” that create “a thicket of reasons why you can’t do something.”

He was responding to a question from Dame Meg Hillier, the Labour MP who chairs the committee in front of which he was appearing, about whether he had prepared enough for government.

Starmer is right to criticise the sclerotic approach and buck-passing attitude that dominates so much of Whitehall and the public sector, but it’s also the case that he and his party were woefully underprepared.

Their vapid election........

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