At a Christmas party I witnessed a showdown between two Labour movers and shakers, one a devoted Starmerite, the other an unrepentant Blairite, over whether the Prime Minister can turn things around. They didn’t agree on much – Keir Starmer’s vision or lack of it, Europe, immigration, you name it. When I commented to another leading figure in the party that Blairites, with the exception of Jonathan Powell (now running foreign policy) and Alastair Campbell (whose podcast has moved him leftwards), seem to have lost faith in this government, this former minister said: ‘Of course they have, because this is the second term of Gordon Brown.’

Among Brownites, it is customary to bemoan the short tenure of their hero and blame his lack of success on Tony Blair’s refusal to stand aside before he had served a decade in No. 10. If only Gordon had had a full term, they complain, we might have had a ‘real’ Labour government. While Blairites often admit New Labour was a joint enterprise, Brownites usually see their vision of opportunity dispensed from on high as the true faith and the Blairite approach of conferring rights on voters as consumers of reformed public services as an aberration.

One way to interpret the Starmer government is to see it as the final triumph of Brown’s communitarian creed over Blairite individualism. The most damning comparison is that, after but a handful of months in charge, it became clear that both Brown and Starmer, who had spent a decade manoeuvring for power, had little plan for what to do when they finally gained it.

In Brown’s refusal to call a quick election in........

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