So once again this morning Keir Starmer has told us he’s going nowhere. I fear he may be the last man in Britain to have noticed this. We have previously had Starmer’s Rivers of Blood speech – this was his Peace in Our Time speech, a rambling discourse of rose-tinted delusion and mistruths, and an obscurantist revision of recent history the polar opposite of what has happened, what is happening and what will happen. This speech, doled out at a lectern in a Waterloo neighbourhood centre, was supposed to be the killer moment he saved his premiership. In the event it was really yesterday’s warmed-up left-overs from the fridge.

Big takeaways? He’s nationalising British Steel. This is really only a change to the stationery and letterheading. British Steel is already nationalised in all but name. British Steel was acquired by Chinese giants Jingye in 2019 for a song. They promised to invest £1.2bn. They didn’t. Instead you paid almost exactly £1.2bn to subsidise their business – because no government would dare let those 3,200 jobs be put at risk. If that isn’t nationalisation by the backdoor I’m not sure what is. How much Jingye will demand for their company remains to be seen.

Oh, the other one was Britain is rejoining the EU.

By the front door, the back door, the tradesman's entrance, whatever it takes Keir is taking us back.

He wants to put us “at the heart of Europe” – which is not very subtle code for rejoining. By hook or by crook. The EU (which spent years showing just how much it detests us) will not entertain a Britain getting any closer than we are without signing up, at the very least, to the single market – and they won’t let us join the single market unless we capitulate 100% to EU rules and laws, without having the slightest input into framing those rules and laws. This is not conjecture, it is stated fact.

We will be “at the heart of Europe” in the same way Norway is at the heart of Europe. In the same way Burnley are at the heart of the Premier League.

It is the Brexiteer’s nightmare scenario – the infamous “rule-taker not rule-maker” role.

In truth the EU has outflanked Britain at every turn while our second rate politicians have been incapable or simply refused to make Brexit a success. The last person to show serious intent in formulating trade deals which would allow a strong sovereign Britain to stand on her own two feet was Liz Truss – and look what the self-immolating Tory Party did to her. Ditto Boris Johnson. The Tories are now in the wilderness and have no-one to blame but themselves.

And so the rolling of the EU pitch by Starmer and Labour begins.

Plan A of course is to demonise Nigel Farage and his Reform Party, for being far too popular and appealing. A popular political party? It’ll never catch on. He painted Farage as some sort of political Gruffalo taking Britain down a “dark path” presumably through the deep dark wood.

Which indicated, with laser-etched clarity, the blind stupidity of the party.

Everything he warns might happen to Britain under Prime Minister Farage is already happening under him.

Listening to Starmer hand out advice on how to make Britain better is like listening to a lemming giving flying lessons.

He gave us the godawful focus-group phrase “strength through fairness” which sounded like the gates of Auschwitz had been updated by Joseph Goebell's woke HR manager. Britain is neither strong nor fair.

Ignorant Leftists wrongly conclude that people are flocking to Reform because they are somehow racist and stupid. It is the eternal Leftist conceit – that we are all stupid and they know better. People are flocking to Reform not because of race but because they perceive Britain to be hugely unfair.

That the burden of work has shifted to the shoulders of the hard-working few to provide for the feckless many. That the National Health Service has become an International Health Service serving people who are not British and have not paid a penny.

Same goes for spending £2bn of our money per year on people who have no right to be here. But most of all that the welfare state has become so obscenely bloated that there is a perception that staying home to watch daytime TV has become a perfectly acceptable career choice in Britain in 2026.

He told us Labour were battling the “despair” on which Reform and the Greens prey and added: “We will face up to the big challenges.”

But the despair is of Labour’s making. We are all working harder (well apart from our welfare citizens) and we are poorer. Much poorer.

“We have stabilised the economy,” he said. Which is true – unfortunately he has stabilised it at zero growth with no sign of that changing anytime soon.

“The world is more dangerous than at any point in my life – I am not going to plunge the country into chaos,” he said without a hint of shame or self-awareness. And he accused Reform of wanting “more division” and seemed genuinely unaware Britain is more divided today than at any time since the other King Charles had a fall out with Oliver Cromwell.

Yes Thatcher split the country in two down ideological lines for a generation – but we were the same country. Now we are fractured, smashed into a hundred pieces like a broken vase. It feels different and more permanent.

Oddly, after last week’s election results, whatever your political leanings, it was hard not to see Reform as a party of unity rather than division such was their universal appeal everywhere except London.

So did Starmer do enough to save his skin? I’m not sure the question is relevant. The problem is the dearth of talent and the prevalence of dangerous zealots in the Labour ranks means the only thing worse than Starmer as leader is just about anyone else.