There comes a point in a prime minister’s career when foreign travel offers respite from domestic trouble. Even when relations with the host country are tricky, as Britain’s are with China, the dignifying protocols of statecraft make a beleaguered politician feel valued.

Next comes the phase where missions overseas feel dangerous because plotters can organise more openly against absent leaders.

Keir Starmer is in transit between those two zones of decline. His position is not yet imperilled by the row over Andy Burnham’s thwarted ambition to run in the Gorton and Denton byelection. But he will be glad that a flight to Beijing puts thousands of miles between him and Labour MPs petitioning to reverse the party’s national executive committee ruling against the Greater Manchester mayor’s candidacy.

Starmer justifiably thinks the first visit by a UK prime minister to China since 2018 is a bigger deal than some story about weaponisation of the party rulebook to block a potential challenger. He would be unwise to neglect how much this stuff matters in Labour.

He is unusual in having reached the top of the party with little experience of the culture, the lore, the unintended consequences that can spiral out from procedural combat.

There was plenty of machination to consolidate Starmer’s position in opposition, marginalising the left and stitching up candidate selections to recruit a cadre of future loyalists. But that was outsourced to Morgan McSweeney, the leader’s chief of staff.

Once installed in No 10, Starmer felt no obligation to care about internal Labour politics. Nor did he cultivate relationships with those new MPs who would, he assumed, dutifully enact government policy.

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