Over the week to come, journalists will repeat three things until they, and you, are sick: that local elections fall next Thursday; that the results will decide the fate of Keir Starmer; and that he is set to do badly. But just how badly, and where? Last week, Starmer’s own party dropped a big clue.

The most popular politician in Britain came down from Manchester to spend the whole day campaigning in London. As Andy Burnham went from Haringey to Brixton, he rallied Labour’s footsoldiers. “Don’t go into the last two weeks with your shoulders down,” he told them. “Get your shoulders up.”

“Ah,” wrote lobby reporters, “now the King of the North is making incursions down south, such is his ambition.” But his visit is more telling than that, and more profound in its implications.

First, London usually exports its Labour activists, loading them in to people carriers to take the good news of Fabianism to those heathens outside the M25. Now it is the capital sending for outside reinforcement. Second, consider Burnham’s itinerary. Lambeth, Haringey, Southwark: these rank among the reddest patches of the UK’s entire electoral map. The country’s last bastion of Labour support, London, is starting to collapse.

Even as they knock on doors and post leaflets ahead of next Thursday, Labour people have already written off whole swathes of the country. They know they’ll get smashed in Scotland and Wales, where in the assembly elections the governing party will be battling simply not to lose too badly. In truth, the death of Labour Wales and Scotland began many years ago, however late Westminster was in........

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