For all my carping over Sir Keir Starmer, I don’t envy him. A technocrat in an age of populism, he has come to power at the worst possible time. Having inherited an economy trashed by successive Tory governments, he is caught between a talus of rocks and a sierra of hard places.

Stuck with a Brexit he actively opposed (but cannot overturn), and a US president he must abhor (but cannot disown), he now faces a third existential threat: a rapidly rising Reform UK with its eyes firmly fixed on his red-wall voters, and much of the right-wing media in its thrall.

On the one hand, Starmer wants to rekindle the UK’s tattered relationship with the EU, on the other he wants to head off Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs and shore up the UK’s “special” yet increasingly fractured relationship with the US. But he can’t cosy up to Europe without poking the Reform bear, and attracting negative headlines from the Daily Mail; and he can’t cosy up to Trump without aggravating the left and morally compromising himself.

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So far, he has walked the political tightrope in a way his advocates might describe as deft and his critics as cynical. He has courted the EU - gaining applause from EU leaders - without committing to any specific vision of the future, or outlining concessions he might be willing to make.

This week he found a (weasel) way to express his disapproval of Trump’s positioning of Gaza as a real estate opportunity without condemning the man himself (or using tough words like “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing”). But with Reform’s popularity waxing as Starmer’s approval ratings wane; with the EU beset by both Russia and........

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