The PM was so slick, so confident, so pleased with himself after winning the 2024 election with a 174-seat majority. That was very much the high point of his political career, because pretty much everything has gone wrong since. Oh, he’ll claim to have done great things. Every time he stands up in Parliament, he runs robotically through his supposed achievements. But few stand up to scrutiny.

He hasn’t “smashed the gangs” behind the small boats. He hasn’t boosted house building, quite the reverse. He only ended train strikes by buying off the unions, who instantly started planning the next one. NHS waiting lists have barely shifted, despite extra cash. His claim to have knocked £150 off energy bills doesn’t stand up either. All he’s done is make taxpayers foot the bill instead.

Starmer’s errors have been endless, with a staggering 13 U‑turns by mid‑January, including on digital ID cards, pub business rates, inheritance tax for farmers, the two‑child benefit cap, Waspi women, income tax and National Insurance, welfare benefit cuts, grooming gangs, winter fuel payments and trans rights. As for the economy, it’s in a dire state. What a mess.

Now he’s in a complete pickle over the Chagos Islands, with US president Donald Trump demanding he scraps it. But there’s one thing Starmer broadly got right: striking an early trade deal with the US on better terms than the EU.

Okay, it wasn’t a fabulous deal. The PM wasn’t even in the room when it was finalised, forced into last-minute concessions by phone while at a football match. Many commentators viewed it as a total sell-out. But it meant the UK only had to pay a baseline 10% tariff on exports, while the EU was charged 15%. At the time, the Express described it as “a bit like the school bully stealing your dinner money and throwing you 50p out of pity”.

Now even that’s fallen to pieces. Trump’s tariff strategy has just been shot down by his own Supreme Court. The US president faces losing more than $130billion in tariff revenue and his chances of a big vote-grabbing splurge before October’s midterms. He’s fighting back with threats of flat 15% global tariffs, which would hit everybody, including us. Bang – our special terms are gone, and so is Starmer’s big win.

British officials are scrambling to see if the preferential arrangements Starmer negotiated on steel, cars and pharmaceuticals still hold. Ministers have vaguely hinted at retaliatory tariffs, but we know full well Starmer doesn’t have the stuffing for that. He basically swallowed what Trump gave him the first time, and it won’t be any different this time round.

Donald Trump is also in a corner, and it serves him right. Whether his latest plan survives depends on the US courts or Congress. But that’s America’s fight, not ours. What matters is this: one of Starmer’s few halfway decent achievements has been blown to pieces before our eyes. We don’t know what will happen to those tariffs, but we do know one thing. The outcome has got absolutely nothing to do with Keir Starmer. Although I’m sure he’ll still claim the credit if all goes well.