Sir Keir Starmer’s Government is in the doldrums at present. Anyone with eyes and a brain realises that. Hell, I bet even the pigeons perched on the roof of Number 10 Downing Street are aware. To make matters even worse, Labour has just come third in a by-election in what used to be its sixth most solid seat, Gorton and Denton in Greater Manchester, early on Friday morning, and if you talk to folk up and down the country, the party and its leader are no more popular.

The Government is aiming to turn around its fortunes by committing to policies like ending the use of hotels to house asylum seekers. Whatever your personal feelings about it, it has been an issue that has got under the skin of so many Brits, who have seen hundreds of new people housed in hotels in their towns. Instead, ministers have selected some old military sites that will house migrants, and one of them is in the East Sussex town of Crowborough, where 500 male asylum seekers are set to be housed, with the first 27 arriving in January.

The, granted, staunchly Conservative area has become a hotbed of discontent, with residents telling me that they “can’t stand” the Prime Minister, and the Home Office simply does not understand locals.

You get the feeling that, because the town has a Conservative MP, who may well be replaced by a Reform UK one at the next general election, and Labour has no hope of winning the seat, the Government does not care about residents’ views, and will plough ahead with its plan in an effort to close asylum seeker hotels and appease the voters they have a chance of winning over.

But this is unwise. Crowborough will not be the only town where migrants will be housed as part of this alternative approach, and a number of their inhabitants will inevitably not be happy.

If East Sussex is anything to go by, local people, and others from elsewhere in the UK, will flock to places where asylum seekers are living to express their discontent, and sights like those seen in the streets of Crowborough, thousands of people marching, could be seen in more areas.

This makes the Government look bad, whatever its intentions. Lots of people don’t care about those – only what they are seeing in the moment.

Poor publicity from places with fervent discontent will spread to people in marginal seats which Labour would need to retain at the next election to have any hope of staying in power.

The situation could get also worse if what happened in Nuneaton and Epping – rape and sexual assaults committed by migrants – occurs in other towns.

I was deeply worried by residents describing Crowborough to me as a “tinder box” and a “ticking time bomb” during my visit there after a ruling went against an attempted legal challenge. There was a certain pathetic fallacy about that day, as locals told me they were devastated in a drizzle of a rain falling from a miserable sky.

Community tension was evident, too, with a homemade sign proclaiming “Crowborough says no to racism.”

It goes without saying that just because someone is seeking asylum in Britain, it doesn’t mean they will definitely present a danger to people, and they need to be housed by ministers anyway.

The Government pointed out in June last year in response to an angry petition against support for asylum seekers that there is a “long-standing legal requirement to provide support to those asylum-seekers who would otherwise be left destitute on our streets”.

But that will be of no concern to many.

And an already hated prime minister and Government could yet hit frankly tragic levels of unpopularity.