(I'm not wading through all that, soz; the writer's sheer love of self and hatred of brevity, as evidenced in the quoted para, was enough for me)

Also, Johnson has (stopped clock, whatever) ridden the wave of one of the most successful, well-executed, and effective vaccination programmes in the world.

Labour has two problems: the perennial one, which is that there's no factionalism like left-wing factionalism, and the tactical, right-now one, which is that Starmer just doesn't have many sticks with which to beat Johnson and his government.

UK Politics* is dead simple. The electorate is, by and large, either just a bit to the left or the right of the centre. Johnson's mad-bastard shotgun approach (e.g. banning gay conversion therapy whilst at the same time demanding photo ID at elections) covers quite a lot of that.

If Labour lurches to the left, there's a whole bunch of centrists (whom the real Labour supporters despise, with bells on), who'll fuck off to the Tories, the Lib Dems, or whoever. If Labour moves to the right, then again, they shed voters, as their left-wing cohort defects to the Greens, or the Lib Dems, or whatever.

The only Labour Leader to figure it out in the past 30 years was Blair. He ran the party like a dictatorship, and didn't give a tuppenny fuck what the vocal but ultimately irrelevant left-wing of the party thought. Can Starmer do it? Fuck knows. There's plenty in the party** who'd rather let the country be run by the Tories forever than lose the internal factional argument.