DAN HODGES: Starmer should now settle for the sport is up. Forget speak of one other relaunch or how voters have been duped by an alliance of onerous Left activists and drug-addled eco-warriors

Deep down, Keir Starmer knows. You could see it in the broadcast clip he delivered immediately after his party’s catastrophic defeat in Gorton and Denton.

‘I came into politics late in life. I came in for one purpose only, and that was to improve the lives of people who want their lives improved,’ he insisted. ‘I’ll continue to fight for them, and I will not stop fighting the extremes of politics.’

But his heart wasn’t in it. In truth, the fight had finally been knocked out of him. Partly because of the sheer scale of his repudiation.

Labour MPs who messaged as the result became clear insisted that Starmer had had no warning.

‘He really thought we had a chance,’ one told me. ‘That’s why he came to the seat to campaign. He never dreamt we’d come third.’

The other issue was that it was slowly dawning there will be no end to his living political nightmare. The scale of Labour’s collapse – to the Greens on the Left and Reform on the Right – means the entire British electoral landscape has become a no-go zone for the Prime Minister. The local elections.

Welsh elections. Scottish elections. Every subsequent parliamentary by-election. He will not just lose them, but be annihilated and humiliated.

So the first thing Sir Keir needs to do is accept his fate. No more relaunches. Or reshuffles. Or speeches about changing the world one breakfast club at a time.

As a minister told me: ‘People thought he’d be our Kinnock. Fair play, he did better than that, but he’s taken it as far as he can. We need to move on now.’

One senior party source I spoke to on Friday still believes Sir Keir will recognise this. ‘I honestly think he’ll see the game is up, and needs to go in a dignified way. That may be some sort of Blair-style pre-resignation. Or he might just say he’s going.’

But if he doesn’t, then for the sake of their country, the Cabinet and Parliamentary Labour Party must force him.

The immediate reaction from Starmer’s MPs in the wake of their disastrous implosion was predictable. They totally lost their heads.

Some rushed out to demand a lurch to the Left. Others called for a renewed defence of the Centre. A few continued to point to the lingering, if diminished, threat from Reform.

They too need to stop. There’s no point anyone within Labour trying to chart a new course for their party while Keir Starmer remains at the helm.

He is an essentially good man. One unlucky to take power at a time when British politics was fracturing. But the Prime Minister is simply too much of a distorting prism. Fairly or unfairly, he is utterly despised by the electorate – an antipathy that traverses the political spectrum.

So he can move Left, Right or burrow deep into the Centre. It will make zero difference. People will reject out of hand whatever Labour is proffering simply because it’s Keir Starmer’s Labour proffering it.

So the second thing Starmer needs to do is set out a clear timetable for his departure.

There’s no great urgency. Labour’s next conference gathering in Liverpool in September would present the optimum moment for an orderly and dignified transition.

And in the meantime it would allow the current psychodrama surrounding his potential successors to abate.

Andy Burnham would have the opportunity to find a seat and, unburdened by Starmer’s toxicity, win. Angela Rayner will have got her tax affairs in order. Wes Streeting will have the opportunity to put distance between himself and Peter Mandelson.

And a broader field of candidates from the Cabinet will have the time and space to set out their own stalls. As would potential dark horses, such as Al Carns.

And then, with the weight of Starmer removed from their shoulders, the Labour Party can finally start the process it should have begun almost a decade ago. Explaining to the voters of Britain what it is actually for, rather than what it is against.

What was staggering about the Gorton and Denton by-election campaign was the way that a sitting Government – less than two years into office – made literally no coherent offer to the voters it was so desperate to retain.

Instead they tried to stampede them to the polling booth with blood-curdling warnings about the fate that would befall them if they voted Reform. What’s more, it was an entirely confected threat, with Reform coming a distant second to the marauding Greens.

The reality is that Britain will not trust Labour with power again unless the party is prepared to let Britain into the secret of what they actually want power for.

Speak to any minister or Labour MP and ask, ‘What’s the Government’s actual plan or agenda?’ and you’ll receive a laugh and a shrug. Actually, never mind ministers and MPs, try asking the Prime Minister himself.

People have spent years trying to unlock the mystery of who Keir Starmer actually is, and what he believes. But the answer – indeed, the defining moment of his premiership – came in June last year, when he admitted to a friendly journalist he hadn’t actually bothered to read, and deeply regretted, his speech claiming Britain was becoming an ‘island of strangers’.

That was the moment the real Keir Starmer stood up.

A well-meaning, political neophyte who did not have the first clue about how to govern, or address the seismic issues of the moment, and who was trying to bluff and bluster and blunder his way through his time in office.

And now that time is up. Not because his perceived enemies in the Press, like me, decree it. Or his political enemies on the Left and Right have engineered it. But because the voters have insisted upon it.

As Starmer stood railing against the dying of the light on Friday, his team were circulating a letter to MPs bemoaning his misfortune. The good residents of Gorton and Denton had been duped by a malign alliance of hard-Left activists and drug-addled environmentalists, he raged. Their toxic coalition ‘cannot survive a General Election campaign’.

His missive reminded me of those members of the Militant Tendency who would greet every new electoral setback with the defiant vow: ‘No compromise with the electorate.’

That is where the Prime Minister is this morning. By insisting he will fight on, he is actually spoiling for a fight with the British people – a fight neither he nor his party can win. The game is up for Keir Starmer. His friends and colleagues need to make him realise that, before it’s too late.