Behind every political fall is a family left to endure the cruel cost

How must it feel, these turbulent days, to be the family of a politician under pressure?

- Melanie Reid

What kind of distress must they endure, witnessing the venom and public contempt directed at the person they love?

Do their tormentors, from the media shock jocks right down to the blowhard in the local pub, ever pause to consider how their wives and children might feel if someone was saying the same about them?

I think we know the answer to that. I feel so sorry for the Starmer family right now, and for Andy Burnham’s and Angela Rayner’s, just as I did for the families of Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson, Theresa May, Liz Truss and David Cameron during their defenestrations.

They’re human. They suffer like the rest of us. Non-combatants, they were, are, or will be forced to watch their loved one be humiliated on the national news, eviscerated online by strangers. Imagine just how upset Keir Starmer’s teenage children — at least one of them said to be sitting big exams — must be, watching their father facing the loss of job, house and status. While they go to school facing sideways glances and sniggers.