Wes Streeting was always meant to be their Labour prime minister. The plan, hatched by a tiny clique of rightwing faction fighters, was this: find a candidate on whom they could fake a continuation Corbynism project to win the leadership. Then kick the ladder away from the people who backed them and the promises they made. At the next general election, given the scale of the Tory majority after 2019, get Labour back in the ring with more MPs and then hand over to Streeting. The real grownups would then be in charge and the subsequent election would be secured.

But no one reckoned with Covid, Tory turmoil and the collapse of the SNP. Suddenly Keir Starmer wasn’t going to just lead Labour to a better defeat and a springboard for victory next time. Against the odds, he was going to win. Just as Jeremy Corbyn was Labour’s accidental leader in 2015, Starmer was the party’s accidental prime minister in 2024.

It was not a marriage made in heaven. Starmer and the Blairites made awkward bedfellows. Under their breath, the Blairites despised Starmer because he had aligned himself with the Corbyn project. While Streeting and Rachel Reeves stayed firmly on the outside, right up until the protracted Brexit negotiations that began in 2018, Starmer had remained loyal to the party leader, whom the Blairites loathed even more than him. But they needed Starmer as the only person who could break the grip of Corbynism precisely because he had promoted it. What the membership wanted was a professional version of Jeremy Corbyn. Starmer was the man. But it was only meant to be a temporary deal.

Having worked closely with

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