DAN HODGES: This lays naked a lot of Sir Keir’s bankrupt and abject political character…

Is there anything – a single piece of basic governance – Keir Starmer can get right? Yesterday, it was announced he’d caved in over his proposal to scrap 30 local council elections in May.

It would be nice to report that this followed a principled change of heart over stripping more than 4million British citizens of their right to vote. But in reality Starmer was forced into another humiliating U-turn through court action brought by Nigel Farage.

A couple of hours earlier he had been specifically asked this on BBC Radio 2: ‘Can we be sure you’ll stick to your course now after those U-turns?’

‘Absolutely. I know exactly why I was elected with a five-year mandate to change this country for the better, and that’s what I intend to do,’ the Prime Minister replied. 

It’s difficult to know which aspect of Sir Keir’s increasingly abject and bankrupt political character this saga has laid most bare. Obviously, there’s his utter ­contempt for the voters. 

Last November, he casually dismissed concerns over the axing of the elections, claiming it was all part of a necessary modernisation of local government and would help save the hard-pressed taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds.

Today, we learnt that ‘modernisation’ was actually illegal and the Government is now having to scrabble around to find an additional £63million to pay for its shambolic reversal. 

And that’s not counting the additional hundreds of thousands of pounds awarded to Reform in legal costs.

Sir Keir Starmer, pictured at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, was last week boasting to his party how he was going to roll up his sleeves and take the fight to Nigel Farage

All of which serves only to underline Keir Starmer’s political ineptitude. Last week he was boasting to his party how he was going to roll up his sleeves and take the fight to Nigel Farage. 

Instead, he has gifted Farage and his party a massive PR coup, swelled their coffers with taxpayer’s cash, and done so less than a fortnight before the pivotal Gorton and Denton by-election.

But that is a side issue when set against Sir Keir’s total ­inability to grasp even the most basic tenets of the high office he purports to occupy.

When the decision to cancel the elections was announced, some people compared him to a Third World dictator. A few warned darkly he might be planning to abolish the general election currently scheduled for 2029. They needn’t have worried. Keir Starmer cannot even manage to scrap a local election properly.

The Prime Minister is not morphing into Britain’s General Pinochet. He’s actually becoming our very own Admiral-General Aladeen, the comical parody created by Sacha Baron-Cohen in his film The Dictator.

In a few weeks I expect we’ll see him standing at the despatch box declaring, like the Admiral-General: ‘War crimes? Please. That stuff never sticks.’

Starmer has gifted Farage, pictured at a Reform rally in Essex on Monday, and his party a massive PR coup, swelled their coffers with taxpayer’s cash, and done so less than a fortnight before the pivotal Gorton and Denton by-election

To be fair to Sir Keir, he did have several co-conspirators in his attempt to gerrymander the May elections. With Reform breathing down their necks, Tory and Lib Dem councillors in the affected regions were hardly up in arms at this blatant threat to democracy.

But the person who holds ultimate responsibility for this farrago is the Prime Minister. Though it’s becoming increasingly questionable whether he even knows how to spell the word ‘responsibility’, never mind honour it.

At around the same time he was pledging there would be no more U-turns, Starmer was asked about the emerging scandal surrounding Labour Together, the campaign group that guided him to power, but has now been exposed as having attempted to smear journalists deemed to have been unsupportive.

‘I didn’t know anything about this,’ he claimed.

Starmer didn’t know anything about Labour Together. Just as he didn’t know anything about Jimmy Savile. Or anything about Peter Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Or his friend and communications director Matthew Doyle’s relationship with a second paedophile as he granted Doyle a peerage.

When Keir Starmer was first elected Labour leader we were told his management of the Crown Prosecution Service left him perfectly placed to govern the nation. His ability to delegate. His forensic ability to dissect complex issues. His comprehensive knowledge of the law.

Yet here we are, with Starmer forced into another capitulation, at more massive expense to the taxpayer, after yet another judicial defeat.

The one silver lining? We can set aside fears of a Starmer dictatorship. Dictators need some basic competence. Admiral-General Sir Keir has none.