STEPHEN GLOVER: Students would run the nation higher than this bathe

Four weeks before the July 4 election, I asked in these pages how long it would take the country to hate Labour as much as it hated the Tories. Two years? Three?

I was far too cautious in my prediction. Labour’s ­collapse has taken place with dazzling speed. Nothing quite like it has ever happened before in Britain to a newly installed Government.

The latest Opinium poll reveals that Sir Keir Starmer‘s approval rating has plunged 45 points since July. While 24 per cent of voters approve of the job he is doing, 50 per cent disapprove, giving him a net rating of minus 26 per cent – slightly worse than poor, unloved Rishi Sunak.

Rachel Reeves, Chancellor and unparalleled doomster, has done almost as badly. Having abolished winter fuel payments for all but the ­poorest pensioners, and promised tax increases in her forthcoming Budget, she has seen a 36-point drop in her net approval since July.

The latest Opinium poll reveals that Sir Keir Starmer’s approval rating has plunged 45 points since July

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner speaks during the Labour Party Annual Conference yesterday 

It’s true that the Conservatives, who are searching for a new leader, are unmourned. No one is crying ‘Bring them back! We were wrong!’ But millions of voters have already given up on Labour, or at least on Starmer and Reeves, and it’s hard to see how they can be won back.

Even now, I have to pinch myself in disbelief. Can this really be happening? I realise that Labour triumphed with the smallest share of the vote in modern times and yet, because of the quirks of our electoral system, got a walloping majority. It was a grudging sort of victory. But what it had it is throwing away.

I ask in all seriousness: If you had assembled a group of sixth-form politics ­students – I assume all such people support Labour – would they have done worse than this shower?

Party members gathering at their conference in Liverpool will doubtless get a kick from robotically repeating the charge of ‘Tory chaos’. The truth is that, when it comes to causing chaos in a remarkably short space of time, Labour needs no lessons from the Tories.

First we had Rachel Reeves’s announcement that she was getting rid of winter fuel ­payments. If she had waited for the Budget, the bad news would have been partly lost in other measures. As it is, by the time the big day arrives she will have given people three months to ­lambast her policy. She has nurtured her own unpopularity.

Her and Sir Keir’s political ineptitude has also been illuminated by their constant doom-mongering, which has succeeding in extinguishing burgeoning optimism about the economy. The green shoots of recovery have been drenched in weed killer.

Labour’s pretence that a ‘£22 billion black hole’ had suddenly been discovered wasn’t simply a lie. It was also a self-inflicted wound. Why would foreigners invest in a country that is being written off by its own Prime Minister and Chancellor as a basket case?

Billionaires are bailing out – the successful businessman Luke Johnson has said that he knows three who are ­leaving the country. Further down the food chain, landlords are selling their houses for fear of being thumped with higher capital gains tax. How will that help the ­private rental market?

Then there is sleaze, which has soaked up much of the Government’s energy for the past ten days. Sir Keir Starmer has been clothed by Lord Alli (as has his wife, Lady Starmer) and generally cosseted by him. The supposedly virtuous Labour leader has been supplied with ­endless freebie tickets.

The really shocking thing is that it took him so long to realise that such behaviour is unbecoming in a Prime Minister. He wanted Lord Alli to go on picking up the bill. Only when it became obvious even to this obdurate man that he was imperilling the Government did he finally capitulate.

As for No 10, it is a nest of vipers. Starmer’s abrasive chief of staff, Sue Gray – as a supposedly neutral civil ­servant she was the author of the report that helped ­despatch Boris Johnson – almost makes Dominic ­Cummings look well balanced and collegiate.

All this – and I’ve really only scratched the surface – in just 11 weeks! It’s beyond belief. We can be fairly confident that even greater mishaps and disappointments lie around the corner.

Does anyone seriously believe that Sir Keir and the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, are going to stop the boats coming across the Channel without a proper policy? What they propose amounts to little more than a tightening of existing measures – minus Rwanda.

Tory leader hopeful Robert Jenrick was right yesterday to suggest that Starmer should be held to account for ‘putting the public in danger’ by scrapping the Rwanda scheme. It would have been defensible if the Prime Minister had come up with an alternative policy, but he hasn’t. A combination of arrogance and stupidity.

Then there’s defence. We’re in the midst of a European war. The Middle East is a cauldron. Yet instead of honouring the Tories’ recent pledge to spend 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence, the Prime Minister has kicked the issue into the long grass by ordering a defence review, which won’t report until next year.

It’s even worse than that. Earlier this month, Defence Secretary John Healey indicated that Britain’s armed forces won’t avoid spending cuts, saying that his department would ‘do our part’ to help fix the public finances. Healey knows Britain needs to spend more on defence, but is overruled by Reeves and Starmer, who can nonetheless find billions for train drivers and junior doctors.

When the definitive list of this Government’s failures comes to be written – and it will be a long one – the refusal to increase defence expenditure in a dangerous world will be near the top. We can only pray that the decision won’t prove fatal.

Like many others, I am in a state of despair. Labour seems utterly unprepared for government, despite having had 14 years to think about it. So many senior ministers are low grade – witness their mindless repetition of ‘Tory chaos’.

Neither Starmer nor Reeves nor most of the Cabinet have any experience of government. The same could be said of Tony Blair and ­Gordon Brown in 1997, but as politicians they occupied a different universe – and I don’t say that as an admirer of either man.

Yet however justly critical we may be of Labour’s shortcomings, it makes no sense to want the Government to fail. For if it continues like this for the next four years, the country will be ruined.

We must accept that, enjoying as it does a vast and impregnable majority, Labour won’t be going anywhere this side of an election. The party can suffer any amount of ­criticism in the Press or from the depleted Tories. Its leadership will survive any number of backbench rebellions.

Starmer might conceivably be removed in a coup, but there’s no reason to suppose that his successor would be more competent.

I’m not hopeful. In fact, I wouldn’t say I have any hope at all. I just pray that, against all evidence and expectation, the Labour Government manages to get its act together in some shape or form. Otherwise we really are doomed.