After the past fortnight in which Labour’s internal bickering has once again distracted attention from government decisions that will affect real lives, it’s worth remembering how Keir Starmer briefly lifted his party’s gaze from its own navel to a higher purpose a few months ago.

That was back in September, the previous occasion when Andy Burnham’s name was being bandied around, when the prime minister seemed to galvanise Labour’s conference by telling it “we’ve got the fight of our lives ahead of us” against Reform UK and “racist” policies that would “tear the country apart”. This would be a “different battle”, he warned, because Labour was up against opponents who represented a strain of rightwing politics alien to a Britain that had never faced “a proposition like Reform before”. He has reiterated this view several times since, not least in a pre-Christmas interview, in which Starmer said that while he could still “sleep at night” under the Conservatives, that wouldn’t be the case if Nigel Farage’s party was in power.

It is remarkable, however, that some of his own party’s staff don’t accept that the stakes are so high or the contrast so stark. Official Labour social media accounts routinely proclaim that the Tories and Reform are “basically the same”. A post last month suggested that these two parties offer only the “same people, same chaos and decline”, while an advertising campaign against Reform titled “Tories: the sequel” is reportedly being planned.

No one is suggesting that these officials have deliberately set out to undermine the........

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