“This isn’t the beginning of the end,” one senior Labour adviser remarked yesterday. “It has gone way beyond that.” To the middle of the end? The late-middle? Forgive the attempt to ascertain the precise coordinates of where we are in the decline and fall of Keir Starmer, which feels like it’s clocking in at slightly longer than the last days of Rome (conservatively estimated at a couple of centuries). Some believe that – like the phrase “heat death of the universe” – the “end of Keir Starmer” may sound like it should be a cataclysmically white-flash event, but will actually unfold over trillions of years.

I think something else is happening. I think we’re getting to the part in the movie where the mortally wounded antagonist hisses: “My death is only the beginning.” Andy Burnham is the sequel nobody asked for. The current inadequacy is a franchise.

Anyway: yesterday. You would say Britain’s defence establishment had turned their guns on Starmer, but I think their point is that they don’t have any. Or they do have guns, but they actually need advanced drones and attack submarines. Let’s just say they have turned their lack of the right kit on Starmer, whose busted managerialist approach to absolutely anything is starting to lend a retrospective sophistication to the former Tory defence secretary Gavin Williamson’s assessment that Russia should “go away and shut up”.

The........

© The Guardian