Ailbhe Rea: Starmer’s Government Gets That ‘End of Days’ Feeling

Only 14 months after Keir Starmer’s landslide election victory, his government has that unmistakable ‘end of days’ feeling. And that’s an extraordinary sentence to be writing.

In just ten days, Starmer has lost his deputy prime minister to a tax scandal, his Washington ambassador to a furore over his friendship with a notorious pedophile, and one of his closest advisers over the leak of historic offensive messages. That’s after a bruising summer in which Reform UK dominated the news agenda, and a difficult first year in which Labour trailed in the polls, made unpopular economic decisions, U-turned on some of those those decisions and was forced to gut its welfare reforms due to a backbench rebellion so big the government was on course for a defeat in parliament.