After a post-election trip into deep England and a day on parade at the coronation, last Monday Sir Keir Starmer and his wife retreated — as so often at moments of triumph and despair — to the Camden home of his friends Baroness Chapman, the shadow cabinet minister, and her husband Nick Smith, the Labour backbencher. There, over bank holiday drinks, he offered the handful of MPs present an “O-Level history lesson”. “Did you know,” he asked, “that only three Labour leaders have won majorities since 1945?”
Left hanging, implicit but universally understood, was Starmer’s newfound conviction that he will make it four. So this is not a column about Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Forget it. Forget coalitions and confidence and supply arrangements. Forget
