To grasp the real threat to Keir Starmer, ignore the chat about freebie specs or Sue Gray. Tune out the now shuttered party conference, with its secure zone of paid babblers. Listen instead to those in a group avowedly loyal to the new prime minister, because they can see the dangers in plain sight.

Labour Together gets called a Westminster thinktank, but that cap doesn’t quite fit. Rather than a policy shop, its expertise is polling and focus groups – the very tools relied upon by a previous boss, Morgan McSweeney, in his strategy to make Starmer Labour leader. Those same instruments are also at the heart of its latest investigation – called How Labour Won – into why and how the party just got into Downing Street.

You might imagine that a bunch of Starmeroids doing a debrief on their own historic landslide would simply puff out their chests and pat their own backs, but no. There’s the odd V-sign flicked in the direction of Jeremy Corbyn, inevitably, yet what’s most striking about their analysis is its tone of frank anxiety. Here is an organisation at the heart of the Starmer project, and it is already worried about how long it’s got left.

The election may have been won by Labour, note the authors, but it was primarily thrown away by the Tories through “their corruption and incompetence”. This goes way beyond gilt wallpaper and Downing Street parties. “Britain’s democracy is not delivering. A majority of voters for all parties have little faith in politicians’ desire to help ordinary people.”

Then comes the........

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