IT IS VERY IMPORTANT IN POLITICS, AS IN LIFE, not to get ahead of yourself. In the heady Glastonbury summer of 2017 Jeremy Corbyn was not, in fact, the prime minister. The fall of the Red Wall was not, in fact, the kind of permanent political realignment that would provide opportunities for ambitious Tory thinkers to get themselves selected in safe Conservative seats in the broken heartlands of the north east of England. Boris Johnson could not, in fact, change.
At the time of writing, Labour has not won the election, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves. But it looks overwhelmingly likely to do so: something that looked overwhelmingly unlikely when Keir Starmer took over as Labour Leader just four years ago. It’s worth asking why and who, if anyone, deserves the credit.
There’s the fashionable answer, on both left and right, that this has more or less nothing to do with Keir Starmer: it
