Even though they were held last Thursday, the local, Scottish and Welsh elections seem an age ago.

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Their reverberations are shaking the very foundations of British politics and also undermining the future of the prime minister.

Midterm elections are always difficult for an incumbent government, so in that sense, these were no different. But they really were. This was arguably the worst set of elections for a government ever. They lost just under 1500 seats, which admittedly was fewer than the 1850 some pollsters were predicting, but awful nonetheless. Combine that with coming third in Wales and a very poor second in Scotland, and the loss of several councils and mayoralties to the Greens, and it is obvious that it cannot be business as usual. Something has to change. But what?

Keir Starmer is not a politician of the normal sort. He doesn’t have any ideological grounding. He doesn’t really know his own party. When he talks about it, there’s no passion of the sort you’d get from Neil Kinnock. That’s a real problem.

What is also a problem is that he doesn’t seem to have anyone left in Number 10 who can write him a decent speech or point out the obvious. For anyone to think that bringing back Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman was the first measure you should take to reinforce a message of change is just risible.

The speech this morning was more of the same. It had echoes of Harold........

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