Starmer is no longer leading his party, he is following it

If I were advising the leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch, on how to make the most of the prime minister's present discomfiture - and heaven knows she needs to take advice - I'd refer her to one of Tony Blair's most memorable exchanges when he was doing her job 30 years ago. Yes, it really is that long.

- SEAN O'GRADY

Just as Sir Keir Starmer is having trouble with his backbenchers now, so too was poor old John Major back then — over Europe, naturally. Blair bossed the prime minister by leaning across the despatch box with a nasty-looking sneer across his face and declared, with great theatrical skill and maximum disdain: “There is one very big difference - I lead my party, he follows his.”

Like Starmer now, Major, back then, was indeed struggling to control his party, and was engaged in constant battles with his rebel MPs, alternately punishing and appeasing them, neither with much success.

Blair’s line was doubly smart because it exploited the obvious division in the ranks of his opponent, but also sought to draw the sharp contrast with his own strong leadership and the changes he was making in his own party.

And today, the U-turns on the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance and, now, the social security reforms - albeit less so the change of policy on the grooming gangs inquiry - do indeed show that Starmer is having to follow rather than lead his party. This dismays the public, even more than the policies themselves.

The whole point of the last general election, it may be recalled, was that the country responded to Labour’s artfully nebulous slogan of “change”. The voters had indeed had enough of “chaos and confusion”, as Starmer called Conservative rule. So they gave him a mandate to get on with governing the country.