It’s a calamity foretold. Many disappointed, upset and angry traditional Labour supporters will not vote for the party in this May’s council election. I am one of the refuseniks.

A fellow hack asks, “Do you want Reform UK to win?”. Obviously not. But Starmer’s government now wears Reform’s divisive language and policies. So a vote for them is not an option.

In 2015, at the Labour Party conference, I was arguing with an insider, now a Lord. I told him ethnic minorities had been used and overlooked by the party for too long. He replied: “Ah, who would you lot vote for instead?” Black and Asian voters flocked to the Tories, some to Reform more recently. And Labour voters of colour helped the Greens win in Gorton and Denton. The disdainful Lord learns we can take our vote elsewhere.

I have voted for Labour in every election, except in 2005, when former prime minister Tony Blair stood again after his bloody Iraq war. By then, he was pushing punitive policies to deter asylum seekers (including from Iraq) and wanted to pack them off to centres in Turkey and Kenya. All the good he had done was squandered.

In our times, Starmer has just been one disappointment after another. Labour under him cannot be trusted. Just as with minority voters, they calculate that left and centre-left voters will always be on side. Many won’t. They will not be taken for granted.

Millions now recoil from the leader who does not resoundingly denounce what even a UN commission of inquiry described as Israel’s genocide in Palestine – or its actions in Lebanon. Instead, he criminalises protests and supplies weapons to Netanyahu. Liberal-minded and just voters detest the draconian policies against incomers, settled migrants, and refugees, and Starmer’s cynical populism – remember that nasty Powellite speech implying white people feel like strangers in their own country? He now says he regrets saying that. I don’t believe him. I think he regrets it led to widespread dismay. This man follows the winds of opinion.

He is rocked by public reactions to Peter Mandelson, Jeffrey Epstein’s dear friend and a smooth operator. Starmer’s “regrets” sound hollow.

Morgan McSweeney’s “stolen” phone arouses the same bilious scepticism in many. There have been too many reasons to doubt the good faith of this Prime Minister and his closest associates.

Starmer commissioned barrister Martin Forde KC to investigate racism, sexism and bullying within the party. In spite of being beset with legal and other obstacles, the final report was clear. I have read it. These problems needed attention and action. But they have not been acted upon. Inconvenient truths, perhaps!

I cannot forget or forgive the way decent people were blocked from standing in elections, while McSweeney-approved candidates were parachuted into safe seats. Faiza Shaheen, a sharp and savvy campaigner for class equality, had built up massive support in former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith’s constituency. She could have won. Starmer’s bully boys wouldn’t let her stand. They let the Tory retain the seat. That same self-defeating power game played out in Gorton and Denton. Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham would have won. Starmer preferred defeat to having a winning candidate. And a possible rival.

I know politics is Machiavellian, devious and cutthroat. But Starmer’s government should have at least tried to be more principled and accountable.

The country longed for clean, fresh and fair politics after 14 abysmal years under the brash, dishonourable Tories. The new dawn came, but the skies turned stormy soon after. Taking freebies from Lord Alli indicated Starmer’s alarmingly loose political ethics. The toolmaker’s son, the once-reputable director of public prosecutions, was not the saviour we needed. His rise to power was grubby and questionable.

I am reading Paul Holden’s The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy, published last year. Holden was on a Question Time-type panel I was chairing at the Oxford Literary Festival last Thursday. The investigative journalist was examining Starmer’s ruthless conquest of the party when McSweeney and his strategists tried to smear him and the Sunday Times’s Gabriel Pogrund, who covered the story. An external agency was paid to do this dirty work.

So, to now. Starmer gives us his latest word bites – pride and hope. And proclaims the same Labour values that he has trampled on. In Wolverhampton yesterday, he asked the public to vote for his party because of “our values… our leadership”. Er, no, Sir.

We need more than such cynical gestures and vapid words. As Hannah Spencer, the new Green MP for Gorton and Denton, told a Guardian reporter: “Wow, people were so angry at Labour. I knew that, and I felt it.” Starmer, still chasing after Reform voters, doesn’t get it. And that makes him unfit for the role.

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