POLITICS is a brutal business, and Keir Starmer is discovering just how personal it can be for someone in the top job.

He’s now in an impossible and frankly unsustainable position.

I write this as someone who had high hopes for him as Labour Party leader.

I sat on the Policing Board that appointed him as our human rights advisor, and sponsored events for the Labour Party Irish Society, which he attended before and after becoming prime minister. I even wrote a policy paper on recalibrating UK-Irish relations for the think tank Labour Together.

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Sir Keir is an honourable and decent man who genuinely cares about some of the big issues facing the UK and globally. He demonstrated his genuineness by flying into Belfast a few weeks back to give an eulogy to the late Sir Desmond Rea, our mutual friend.

Unlike some others, he’s not a career politician. He’s a dedicated public servant trying to do his best in the political arena, where he’s wholly ill-equipped.

Good intentions aren’t enough in leadership, and his ability to communicate effectively with his own party and the public has been nothing short of disastrous.

Starmer’s domestic policies, even the successful ones, have been clumsy and haven’t landed well.

His over-reliance on a clique of mainly yes-men as advisors has been problematic. Some of them portrayed........

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