You can feel Labour’s electoral coalition fraying in the cold, rain-soaked streets of south-east Manchester. With nine days to go now until the historic byelection in Gorton and Denton, one thing unites these otherwise diverse communities: a visceral contempt for the prime minister.

Mention Keir Starmer’s name and people laugh: not with affection but disbelief, as though it’s faintly absurd to treat him as a serious topic of conversation. “He just doesn’t stick to his word,” says a middle-aged woman walking her dog, stressing that her real feelings would be impolite to print.

And it is hard to argue with her, not least as Starmer’s government reels again after yet another head-spinning, chaotic U-turn – this time forced upon him by Nigel Farage and Reform. A plan to delay local elections abandoned in humiliating fashion, not because the PM realised it was the wrong thing to do, but because Farage raised a legal challenge and Starmer knew he would lose it.

“He says he’s going to do something and then doesn’t,” the dog walker says. Her view is widely shared: according to YouGov, six in 10 Britons believe Starmer is untrustworthy, with just two in 10 believing the opposite.

These are the fruits of a political project crafted by Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s recently departed chief of staff. It was smart politics, he clearly believed, to mislead the Labour membership into voting for him six years ago by offering leftwing policy pledges and then abandoning them. But the founding sin became the defining trait: voters routinely perceive this government to be innately deceitful and duplicitous.

Walk the streets of Gorton........

© The Guardian