Following Kemi Badenoch’s powerful evisceration of a shaky Sir Keir (and from a human angle, how unedifying to see anyone shaking so visibly) the clock started ticking on his political demise. And as he studies the damage to the Good Ship Starmer, he needs to realise one salient fact, this is all of his own making.

The triple whammy of Mrs Badenoch’s questioning– and when did you last witness such a forensic and skilled performance from a leader of the opposition? – about whether Starmer had known about Peter Mandelson’s continued friendship with the dead paedophile Jeffrey Epstein after his conviction was the sucker punch that left her victim winded, wrecked and wounded. Fatally. The ensuing reaction from his backbenchers and the way in which his senior colleagues all focused on the floor, the ceiling, each other or indeed anything else told you everything you needed to know.

Their silence spoke volumes.

It had started badly for Starmer when he bleated that Mandelson had “lied and lied and lied” to him, but for a supposedly forensically skilled barrister and former Director of Public Prosecutions, surely the ability to spot when someone is lying is the most basic of skills?

The sad truth for Team Starmer is that their man has the most un-tuned political antennae of any political leader, let alone PM, in years. From the moment he struggled to answer whether a woman could have a penis, we all knew that while he is a decent person and undoubtedly well meaning, he’s still a dud. Process over personality, soundbites over sound policies.

But his “crime” in trusting ‘Petey,’ as Mandelson was known to sex offender Epstein, was not unique to Labour Prime Ministers.

Amazingly, Mandelson has been trusted and promoted by a total of THREE Labour PMs and yet can be seen to have embarrassed if not betrayed all of them. Why then, as so many of my callers were asking on my radio show throughout last week, has this extraordinarily complex individual pulled off more comebacks than Lazarus?

The answer is shockingly simple: he’s as canny a political operator as has ever prowled in, or around, the corridors of power. If he wasn’t the architect of the New Labour project, he was certainly the chief designer.

With ‘attack dog’ Alastair Campbell, he effectively invented the idea of smear tactics and the world of spin. Not for nothing did the infamous idea of the attacks on the World Trade Centre being “a good day to bury bad news” come after his influence on an aged and out of touch Labour party. Two decades ago, Tony Blair said the entire New Labour project would only be complete when the party came to “love” Peter Mandelson.

In its current perilous state, it’s easy to see why any love once there has now turned to hate.

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Hope the security team that cleared Mandelson weren’t involved in checking the new Chinese Embassy…

What the hell does this over-entitled oaf not get! As bulletins and headlines reverberated around the world concerning his ceaseless appearances in the ‘Epstein Files’ including allegations of threesomes and payments to exotic dancers for certain sex acts – all of which he denies – Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor decided to saddle up and go for a ride as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

So, all hail the King as his brother Charles reportedly decreed he was to be moved out of his sprawling Windsor mansion and into the relative obscurity of the Norfolk Sandringham estate pronto.

Now staff at his new home are allegedly demanding they should be allowed NOT to serve him. While that seems totally fair, any chance just one could ‘serve’ him with legal papers to testify in a US court?

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A so-called diversity drive for our countryside has been set up by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs as they deem rural areas “too white and middle class” and claim ethnic minorities are “anxious over unleashed dogs.”

What offensive, arrogant tosh. And being nervous about an unleashed dog has nothing to do with your ethnicity.

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As the headlines were justifiably dominated by other events last week, you might have missed the release of the latest indictors of Labour’s disastrous mishandling of the economy. They were that unemployment hit an 11-year high and that the Bank of England believes there will be no meaningful growth for the rest of the decade.

Who was it who once said “Labour isn’t working?”