When he does go, what will the political death certificate give as the true cause of Keir Starmer’s demise? It won’t be the Peter Mandelson scandal, the policy U-turns or the bleak nights at provincial counting centres. All these are symptoms, not the disease. No, what is turning the guy elected just 19 months ago into an ex-prime minister is the slow realisation among ministers, colleagues and voters of one essential truth about the man: there is less to him than meets the eye.

His promises get shrunk in the wash. A green new deal is jettisoned, an Employment Rights Act has a large watering can poured over it, a bold manifesto pledge to end Britain’s feudal leasehold laws suddenly grows caveats.

The same goes for his claimed achievements, a modest puddle that in sunlight swiftly evaporates. Just listen to his cabinet ministers this week, mouthing hostage-video messages of their boss’s achievements: a roll-call that begins with extended childcare – actually one of the last deeds of Rishi Sunak – and scrapping the two-child benefit cap, forced on No 10 by Labour backbenchers.

In this land of vanished crafts and endangered trades, there did arise recently a nice cottage industry of defining “Starmerism”. Writers and academics tried to plumb its depths and chart its hinterland. Some bravely went as far as Reigate in Surrey to search for clues in the man’s childhood home, but all eventually gave up the task as hopeless, the last surrendering somewhere between his government’s ninth and 11th U-turn.

They could have saved themselves the bother and simply defined it as shrinking ambitions, attainments, electoral base. It’s not a philosophy but a business model, and for years it was taken as a profitable one – even if some of us warned of the dangers long ago. Now it is understood as leading only to bankruptcy.

When Mandelson texted his Westminster apprentice Wes Streeting last March that “the government problems do not stem from comms”, he was spot on. The problem is not communications; it’s that there is so little to pass on. And........

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