Before David Cameron got the job of prime minister, he was asked why he wanted it. ‘Because I’d be good at it,’ he replied. This has always been told as evidence of Cameron’s arrogance and hubris, but it was also, until the end, a defendable position. I’ve always thought Keir Starmer thought largely the same. He’d risen to the top of the law and considered politics a logical career change. He believed he could get more done that way. The Cameron quote I’ve always thought genuinely hubristic came when he told another friend questioning his desire to get to No. 10: ‘How hard can it be?’

Both Cameron and Starmer know the answer to that. Politics is bloody difficult. Our problems are deep and intractable. There are enemies everywhere (including in your own party) and you have to have a plan and the ability to execute it. Until the referendum campaign, he largely did. But Starmer was less temperamentally or politically equipped to be prime minister.

In his resignation speech, Starmer fairly boasted that he had changed his party, driven out the anti-Semites and won a landslide election victory. He also deserves credit for keeping the show on the road long enough with Donald Trump to get a tech arrangement over the line (though much of that is now in doubt) and for continuing Britain’s support for Ukraine. But his mistakes far outweigh his triumphs. How exactly did a landslide win turn into a premiership shorter than that of Theresa May and Boris Johnson?

Douglas Adams said there meaning of life, the universe and everything was 42. So here are the 42 reasons Keir Starmer failed:

The truth about Keir Starmer’s legacy

The last days of Starmer: A view from inside the No.10 bunker

Starmer’s tears show why he failed as PM

He thought politics reprehensible and beneath him and never acquired the craft of doing it well.

The original sin was that he had no plan before the general election and his efforts to develop one in power were comical (remember the missions, pillars and targets?).

Knowing he didn’t know how to prepare for government, he hired Sue Gray to do it for him, but she had spent decades blocking and covering up mistakes, not driving policy development or even running a department.

He let his (brilliant) campaign manager Morgan McSweeney focus on the campaign, rather than force him to consider life after the election (McSweeney now admits this was a mistake).

He approved a pledge not to raise income tax, national insurance and VAT before the election, which he did not need to do to win the election and which dramatically limited his options once he won.

The election landslide led Starmer to mistakenly talk about his mandate when it was actually a generational rejection of the conservatives.

On winning power, instead of telling the country the cavalry had arrived to save the economy, which Rishi Sunak had already got moving in the right direction, he........

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