It’s a running joke in Westminster that some on the British centre-left are fascinated by American politics to the point of obsession. So much so that it extends to the fictional: in 2006, a group of rebel Labour MPs inspired by the long-running US drama the West Wing borrowed tactics from its plotline to successfully defeat the government in a vote. It’s right, therefore, to be wary of over-extrapolating lessons for the Labour party from the Democrats’ presidential defeat.

But with inflation again on the rise, there will be more parallels between the economic backdrops to the Kamala Harris 2024 campaign and a 2029 Labour general election campaign than the party would like. There have been reams of analysis on why the Democrats lost, but the most important takeaway is that, in the context of living standards eroded by high inflation, a candidate who found it difficult to connect with voters and struggled to explain why her party should be given another four years was punished accordingly.

It’s not just the Democrats: in New Zealand, Japan and South Africa, governments have been booted out of office in what the academic Rob Ford has called “the greatest wave of anti-incumbent voting ever seen”. Worryingly for Labour, there is little to suggest that this curse of incumbency is going to lift anytime soon.

Labour’s first few months have been dominated by a series of political rows very much of the present: the out-of-the-blue announcement about means-testing pensioners’ winter fuel payment; questions........

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