At moments this past week, British politics resembled the frantic WhatsApp group of a relegation-threatened football club’s hierarchy. Rumours flew, denials hardened and the knives were never far away. Sir Keir Starmer survived his potential demise. Just.

But days after we swerved another switch, the wider picture feels familiar: a system addicted to change, mistaking it for progress. Football, of course, has been here for years. It’s hard not to see Labour parliamentarians’ vote of confidence in Starmer as akin to a club expressing its “full confidence in the manager”, just as Tottenham Hotspur manager Thomas Frank felt the club’s board had done last week. A few days later, Frank was gone.

When a club panics, it sacks the manager. It rarely pauses to address whether the squad is good enough, the structure coherent, or the expectations realistic. It just changes the man in the club tracksuit. This week alone, we’ve seen the respective dismissals of Frank and Nottingham Forest’s Sean Dyche discussed in the breathless tones once reserved for prime ministerial coups. In football, the language........

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