WE’RE just three weeks away from the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and English local council elections on May 7.

And maybe, depending on how bad a night it turns out to be for Labour, just three weeks away from Keir Starmer announcing his resignation.

Right now, he will have a team of number-crunchers calculating the scale of possible catastrophe: a scale that will begin with ‘Phew, that was too close for comfort’ and ending with, to paraphrase Frasier Crane, “Abraham Lincoln had a brighter future when he picked up his tickets at the theatre box office”.

Starmer’s biggest problem, or so it seems to me, is his complete lack of passion.

It’s a problem he shares with David Cameron (still, and by a considerable margin, the worst prime minister in my lifetime).

Passion alone doesn’t make you a great prime minister, of course. Just look at Boris Johnson. But it makes it much easier for you to connect with the different elements of your party’s voting base.

Starmer didn’t do that in the 2024 general election, and he didn’t even manage it afterwards with a thumping majority. The tumbrils are on the way for him, and nobody seems to care – apart from those on his advisory and government payroll.

The Greens and Zach Polanski will also be watched very closely, not least by Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey, who seems to think that electoral success requires nothing more than increasingly absurd photo-stunts and industrial scale jibber-jabber.

The past couple of years should have been perfect storm territory for his party, as both Labour and the Conservatives are falling apart at the seams.

But because he prioritised trivia over hard-nosed politics and deconstruction, he has found himself eclipsed by a leader who isn’t even an MP. Moreover, a leader who is presenting his party as the only way to prevent a Farage government.

To be quite honest I no longer care what happens to the Conservative Party.

It has morphed into a cross between Fawlty Towers and the Borgias; stupidly ruthless and ruthlessly stupid.

Every piece of credibility was stripped from it between 2016 (Cameron scuttling away) and 2024 (Sunak genuinely believing he could do what John Major did in 1992 and win an election against all the odds).

Kemi Badenoch is both dire and in dire straits. I wonder if, at any point since she became leader, she has actually noticed that almost every problem she points to during her Wednesday showdowns with Starmer can be traced to Conservative governments since 2010.

And, let’s be honest, being duffed up regularly by someone as hapless as Starmer is hardly an advertisement for her supposed abilities.

John Swinney, leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party, has surprised a lot of people by putting the party back on its feet after a rough couple of years. It now looks set to form its fifth government – maybe even with an overall majority.

It is also back to the hard sell for a second independence referendum, but getting that would require an increased vote, a convincing overall majority of the votes cast and – the ultimate dream – a remarkably high turnout which gifted them more than 50% of the entire electoral register. But I don’t think that will happen.

Nigel Farage – polling unexpectedly better in Scotland and Wales than seemed likely a few years ago – is hoping for an outcome that utterly spooks the Conservatives and his assorted rivals on the right wing, including Advance UK and Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain (which won’t be registered in time to take part in the elections).

Any slippage will embolden them, maybe even to the extent of working on some sort of pre-2029 general election alliance.

Like unionism in Northern Ireland, Farage has the kind of enemies who would tolerate victory for others if it brought him and Reform down to earth with a might crash. An outcome which would be welcomed by the Conservatives, too.

All in all, May 7 has the potential to be a genuinely interesting mid-term election.

All of the main parties have a lot to prove, and it isn’t just Starmer and Badenoch who will be watching their backs in the early hours of May 8. So too will Ed Davey and the leaders of the Conservatives and Labour in Scotland and Wales.

Polanski has to prove that the Greens are taken seriously; certainly more seriously in electoral terms than they have been up to now.

By-elections attract enormous attention for the party that wins, but to be taken really seriously a minority party has to win at the elections which follow.

Farage, though, has most to lose. If anything goes wrong for Reform on the night, he will get the blame. He doesn’t like blame.

And he doesn’t like hanging around if he doesn’t continue to smell victory on the wind.

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