Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O’Flynn

Keir Starmer needs a reshuffle to win back the Blue Wall

Keir Starmer (Photo: Getty)

The most important fact about British politics is also the most mundane: the next general election is an awfully long way off.

Given the extraordinary events we are living through, it is sometimes tempting to forget this and to suppose that a big political moment in any given week is going to have transformative consequences.

I have previously referred to outbreaks of this syndrome as flare-ups of ‘that bloke who drove to Durham that time’. This is in honour of all those pundits and MPs (including Tories) who claimed, ridiculously, that the Dominic Cummings saga was a game-changer that was bound to feature as a top cause of voter outrage with the government come the next election.

In fact, we all need to slow down. After living through an Italianate cycle of general elections every other year and governments being formed by coalitions, quasi-coalitions or wafer-thin majorities, we now have a single party administration founded on a very large Commons majority.

Oddly, given the imminent repeal of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, we also pretty much know when the next election will be. The Tories will not run the parliament for the full five-years because that would mean another winter election. Neither will they go to the country in 2023 because that would shave almost a third off their term of office. So Britain will next elect a new House of Commons in the spring or early summer of 2024. Until then, we will very probably have Boris Johnson as Prime Minister and certainly the Conservatives as our government.

For those who despise him and it, some words from Larkin’s famous poem Toads come to mind: ‘Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork/And drive the brute off?’ Well, no you can’t. Not anytime soon anyway.

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