Means-testing winter fuel was obviously correct

I’ve seen a lot of people, lately, making the case that the big problem with Sir Keir Starmer’s government is that its leader doesn’t know what he thinks. The case, essentially, is that he’s in perpetual campaign mode; and that rather than leading (as he’s elected to do) and making the case for the policies he believes are right, he is chasing the ignis fatuus of whatever he imagines to be public opinion. He’s outsourcing policy, runs this line of thinking, to his campaign guru Morgan McSweeney in the hopes of arriving at some formula that will simultaneously appease his backbenchers, lock in the metropolitan progressives, and magically also appeal to socially conservative red-wall types who will otherwise defect to Reform.

This case gets stronger and stronger, I regret to say. Hence, most egregiously, his pirouette on whether women can have dicks. Hence his grandstanding on immigration. Hence his dithering on lifting the two-child limit – it has been calculated as potentially rescuing tens of thousands of children from poverty; but McSweeney apparently frets that it wouldn’t get enough bang – aka ‘electoral capital with voters’ – for the buck.