Good things come in threes, don’t they? First, Starmer’s cruel pursuit of changes to the inheritance tax on farmers. The reform initially sounded like a dry technical tweak made by Treasury bean counters. However, on the ground, it is far more serious: an existential threat to family farms and rural communities nationwide.

Farms are asset-rich but often cash-poor. Whilst land values have risen, margins have collapsed, and many farming families already operate on wafer-thin profits. Slapping inheritance tax on them to satisfy the slathering beast locked up in the Treasury’s dungeon does little more than force families to sell land they have been stewards of for generations.

Worse still, the gross ineptitude fits into a wider pattern. The Government’s newly announced plans to improve animal welfare, pronounced with great chest-thumping enthusiasm by our betters in Westminster, have exposed the delusional fantasy of dressing up “progress” as anything other than busybody moral housekeeping. A ban on trail hunting only serves to underscore how disconnected a Prime Minister ensconced in central London is from the realities of rural life.

The countryside is not crying out for symbolic posturing from an urban elite. It is struggling with real problems: rising poverty, the closure of village shops and pubs, collapsing bus routes and dwindling local services. Yet Starmer’s response is to target farming, recreation and land ownership – visible symbols of rural life – whilst ignoring the deeper economic misfortunes hollowing communities out.

Blunder number two is Starmer’s much-publicised broken promise on taxation. He stood on a manifesto that explicitly pledged not to raise taxes on working people. On no fewer than 52 occasions, he and his MPs made that promise as they begged for votes.

And that pledge was put on the pyre as soon as possible. With income tax thresholds frozen and millions dragged into paying higher bands, and National Insurance on employers hiked, that promise is not worth the flimsy paper it was written on. The effect is simple: people are paying more for the inestimable honour of earning the same. This is stealth taxation, and it has had a ruinous effect on jobs, hitting those who cannot afford clever accountants the hardest.

For younger workers, already bowed under backbreaking rents, alongside student loan repayments and stagnant wages, this is nothing short of a betrayal. Starmer promised stability. Instead, he has delivered a tax system that punishes work and rewards inertia.

The third blunder is his obsessive desire to “reset” relationships with Brussels. Starmer insists this is about pragmatism, not politics, but few people should be fooled. He was a Remainer then, and he is a Remainer now. His language of closer alignment with the EU is not diplomacy; it is an attempt to bring the UK back into the orbit of a bloc it voted to leave.

Brexit was not a technical error to be corrected by clever lawyers in suits, paid for by someone else. It was a democratic decision. Trying to unpick it by stealth risks reopening the deepest political wounds of the last decade, just as the country needs stability.

None of this adds up to a coherent vision. Farmers are squeezed. Workers are taxed. Voters are lectured about choices they have already made. If Starmer believes these are the lessons Britain needed, then he has learned entirely the wrong ones. And the longer he continues down this path, the clearer it becomes that this is not careful governance – it is a Prime Minister who has lost his way.