Seldom, if ever, can a British prime minister, barely a year into office and sitting on an enormous parliamentary majority, have gone to their annual party conference with so much riding on it.
Yet that is the weird situation Keir Starmer faces this week at the Labour conference in Liverpool. His party, which is largely to the left of him, craves ‘red meat’ such as scrapping the cap that restricts payment of child benefit to the first two children in a family and a more aggressive stance towards Israel over the conflict in Gaza.
Two rival parties — the Greens and Your Party, the new vehicle being launched by his hard-left predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn — threaten to tap into that vote.
At the same time, the polls are led by Nigel Farage’s populist Reform Party, whose combination of nationalism and — so far as the economy goes — aspirations for big government, is peeling away votes from both Labour and the center-right Conservatives alike.
Business, which Starmer wooed assiduously before the general election in July last year, is in a particularly mutinous mood. His Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, unexpectedly hit them with a £25 billion increase in payroll taxes in her first Autumn Budget and, as a result, unemployment is rising, job vacancies are falling and hiring intentions depressed.
