All governments disappoint us in the end. Some policies fail, divisions open up, ideological dead-ends are reached and national problems are left unsolved. The big question is at what point widespread disillusion sets in: after a few months, a few years, or longer. The answer has decisive consequences for a government’s sense of itself and for its electoral fate.

You might think this government, only seven weeks old, the first entirely new Labour administration for a quarter of a century, with a huge majority and ministers working hard while much of the country is on holiday, will be safe from voter disdain for quite a while. Yet that assumption may be optimistic. Not just because of Labour’s thin total vote at the election, or the immense national problems it has inherited, but for other, less examined reasons. Ruling from the centre-left is particularly difficult, as Labour governments have regularly demonstrated. And changes in the media and in how voters think have made that task even harder.

Centre-left government, as its name suggests, is an awkward compromise: between a degree of leftwing radicalism and wherever ministers and their policy advisers and electoral strategists think the political middle ground is. Such governments typically try to find a balance between boosting capitalism and regulating it, between redistributing wealth and keeping economic elites content, between making foreign policy more ethical and accepting existing power arrangements.

In theory, a government that both reforms and leaves things alone, according to “what works”, as Tony Blair put it during his long premiership, ought to........

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