‘“I’ll be PM this time next year,” Starmer tells BBC.’ Such was the headline on the BBC’s website over the Prime Minister’s interview with Laura Kuenssberg, in a place of some prominence. I feel like I’ve read this one before, don’t you? It is, hilariously yet also, oddly, boringly, the headline that now goes on every interview our useless PM gives. Out he sets, determined, as I expect he sees it, to draw a line under the speculation about his future and talk about the things that really matter to hardworking families, salt-of-the-earth toolmakers, and so on – and the most interesting thing he manages to say is that he’s still going to be in his job a year from now. Which hardly draws a line. Indeed, to adapt Thom Gunn’s squib ‘Jamesian’: ‘His premiership consisted/ In discussing if it existed.’

I am honestly surprised and bewildered by how useless this Prime Minister has turned out to be

It needs little pointing out that he’s not exactly in a position to know. It needs little pointing out, too, that Keir Starmer’s speculation about Keir Starmer’s job security, given what else is going on in the world now, is pretty low down the list of anyone’s news........

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