reform uk within reach of main two uk parties

100 days in, and it has not, to put it mildly, gone to plan. Other than Liz Truss, who after all was defeated by a lettuce, no new prime minister has experienced such a dramatic plunge in ratings in the history of polling. Keir Starmer is now rated as less popular than Nigel Farage. One poll even suggested he was less popular than Rishi Sunak, who is - after all - the routed leader of a Tory party which presided over the most catastrophic government in British democratic history.  

There was never any enthusiasm for Starmerism: its victory was entirely driven by Tory self-destruction, from partygate to Liz Truss to stagnating living standards to an imploding English NHS. Pre-election polling found that on key polling measures - public trust it would keep promises, that it understood modern Britain, that it had a good team of leaders, or that it was fit to govern - Labour had substantially weaker ratings than in 2014 under Ed Miliband, just prior to an election defeat 

 Devoid of a clear overall mission, the leadership swiftly degenerated into infighting, with the allies of Starmer’s right-wing campaign manager launching an acrimonious briefing war against Sue Gray, top civil servant turned chief of staff, who was then unceremoniously dumped. Rosie Duffield - a Labour MP who could not be dismissed as an irreconcilable leftist rebel - resigned with a vicious attack on the leadership, declaring “sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice are off the scale”, that Labour’s imposition of hardship on children and pensioners was morally bankrupt, and declaring Starmer had a “lack of basic politics and political instinct.”
When transport secretary Louise Haigh - one of the very few ministers who can be described as effective - rightly denounced P&O as “rogue operators”, Starmer threw her under a bus, protecting a company which sacked hundreds of workers by Zoom.
Here is a classic Greek tragedy, of hubris meeting nemesis. Starmer’s clique clearly believed that having hammered the left with media approval, while the Tories imploded on their own account, that they would continue to play politics on easy mode. Inflated egos, an absence of vision and principle, a dearth of integrity and, yes, competence: all this brutally collided with reality.