On a bone-chillingly cold morning in January, it felt as if I had suddenly found at least part of the reason for Keir Starmer’s chronic unpopularity. I was in the Mancunian constituency of Gorton and Denton, where the prime minister and his people’s decision to block Andy Burnham from standing was about to hand victory to the Green party. More specifically, I was in a forlorn covered market about to be regenerated into a “food and drink cluster”, talking to a sixtysomething man nursing a mug of tea.

What, I wondered, did he think of the man at the top? He gave me roughly the same answer that I’d heard from a lot of my other interviewees: “I really don’t like him at all.” But like most other people I met that day, he couldn’t quite explain what fired his antipathy, which seemed to make it worse. His face scrunched into a mixture of scepticism and exasperation. “I don’t know why – I just don’t,” he said. The most specific answer I got from anyone else was: “He hasn’t done what he said he’d do.” So there it was: as well as a modern tendency to loathe politicians that regularly seems arbitrary, whipped-up and way over the top, a sense that Starmer’s sheer blankness – his painful lack of clarity and the absence of a halfway coherent story about his own government – was making a lot of people dislike and mistrust him all the more.

A couple of months before, Ipsos had put Starmer’s approval rating at -66, the lowest figure recorded for a PM since it had first started calculating them. Even Liz Truss had not reached such a howling nadir. The chant of “Keir Starmer’s a wanker”, to the central riff from the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army, had echoed around not only football stadiums, but January’s world darts championships at Alexandra Palace. The following month, the more generous descriptions of Starmer offered by focus groups included “jellyfish” and “doormat”. Even the people in charge of them were surprised at the levels of venom and mockery. “I can normally understand where the public are coming from,” said Luke Tryl of the........

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