Starmer doesn't realise he's on a one-way ticket to the knacker's yard

The more the Prime ­Minister’s popularity plummets – and no PM has been more unpopular than Keir Starmer since modern polling began – the more he tries to shield himself from public scrutiny and the judgment of voters who’ve come not just to dislike him but, in many cases, to detest him.

So local elections he knows Labour is going to lose are cancelled. Access for journalists trying to hold him and his government to account is curtailed. Opinions on race, gender and immigration which do not conform to his ­Government’s liberal-Left worldview are rigorously policed – and miscreants often penalised.

No opportunity is missed for him to escape these shores even on the flimsiest of globetrotting excuses – making it all the easier for him to avoid proper interrogation on the disasters regularly unfolding back on the home front.

In the shambolic weeks leading up to last month’s Budget he disappeared abroad seven times, dodging the flak assailing his Government from all sides. His disdain for the normal democratic processes is best illustrated by his determination to evade elections.

New mayors were due to be elected next May in four areas of southern England. Candidates had been chosen and the parties were gearing up for the fight.

Earlier this month, it was suddenly announced that these mayoral elections would be delayed until 2028.

More time was needed, claimed ministers, to complete the reorganisation of local government currently under way.

Nobody was fooled. The elections were being postponed because, on current polling, Labour stood no chance of winning any and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK had a good chance of winning them all. So kick them into the long grass in the hope things will look better for Labour in two years’ time.

Nor did Starmer’s increasingly anti-democratic tendencies stop there. His government has now written to 63 district and county councils ‘inviting’ them to postpone their May elections until at least next year because local government reforms will see them folded into new all-purpose unitary councils.

For some who already had their elections postponed last year it would mean a seven year gap between the last election and the next.

Imagine it was the Tories who were doing this. Labour would be up in arms, rent-a-mob would be mobilised to take to the streets, BBC News would be having conniptions and BBC Verify would be drawing comparisons with Nazi Germany. But because it’s Labour too many commentators just take it in their stride.

There’s no mystery why Starmer is anxious to curtail as many May local elections as he can: Labour MPs and activists have made it clear that a bad performance would mean curtains for Starmer (plenty of his backbenchers don’t even want to wait that long).

Almost half the councils where he wants to cancel the May vote are run by Labour. He faces a ­ wipeout in most.

Starmer calculates he can mitigate the fallout from the electoral car crash everybody expects by limiting the number of councils contested.

Even the monarchy is being ­dragooned into the strategy to save his skin. There’s talk of a King’s Speech immediately after the May elections to inhibit rebels from doing anything too quickly that would put the King in an embarrassing position.

It’s a sign of Starmer’s flimsy grip on political strategy that he thinks Labour rebels would care about embarrassing the King. Moreover, there’s nothing he can do about the elections to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, also scheduled for May, in which Labour is expected to get an electoral kicking, probably coming third in both behind the nationalist parties and Reform.

Even with local democracy curtailed in England, Labour MPs will have plenty of reasons to turn on Starmer come the election results in May — if they wait that long.

The danger for the rest of us is that, the more Starmer realises his days are numbered, the greater disdain he will have for democracy. Signs of a nascent dictatorial tendency already abound.

Trial by jury has been synonymous with Britain’s long journey towards fully fledged democracy for centuries. Starmer and his witless Justice Secretary (David Lammy, another lawyer) rhapsodised about it when in opposition.

Now they propose to scrap it in England and Wales for all but the most serious crimes. Magistrates and judges alone would determine the outcome of thousands of trials determined, until now, by juries.

The Government claims it’s the best way of dealing with the huge backlog of cases now clogging up the courts.

Most experts say it’s not worth losing a fundamental right for a change that would make only a marginal difference at best — that what is needed is a more efficient, better-funded court system.

Almost 40 Labour MPs have described the move as ‘madness’. Yet still the government ploughs on with a reform that illustrates its disinclination to trust the people, preferring rule from on high.

That same distrust can be seen in Starmer’s enthusiasm for (effectively) compulsory ID cards and enhanced facial recognition technology. Both designed to give the Government more control over the populace. Both totally at odds with a PM who in opposition promised a government which would ‘tread more lightly’ on the lives of the British people.

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Instead, we have a people now self-censoring (according to a recent Ipsos poll) on social media lest Starmer’s thought police come knocking on the door.

A people who curb their tongues while anti-Semites flood the streets with calls to ‘Globalise the Intifada’, among other obscenities, as the police stand idly by.

Only after the Bondi Beach atrocity – a grizzly globalising of the intifada in action – have the police indicated they might take a tougher line with the marchers.

A government with all these tendencies, you might think, needs all the scrutiny a free media can muster in a democracy. But even here Team Starmer is moving to curtail accountability.

Instead of two daily briefings by a senior No 10 aide during which journalists can ask whatever they want (the convention for decades) there will be only one – and none on days when some minister decides to hold a press conference instead.

No big deal, you might think. But I attended these lobby briefings as a young journalist. They could be fierce, often forcing the government onto the back foot. Anybody could ask a question and the briefings went on for as long as the journalists wanted.With press conferences, on the other hand, the Government controls the timing, the length, the subject and even who gets to ask a question. That’s the way Team Starmer likes it.

Of course, even with greater access, it’s never that easy to pin Starmer down — he always seems to be away in some far-off land. Yes, a press pack travels with him but the chances to quiz him are usually perfunctory and he controls the agenda. They say travel broadens the mind. But in Starmer’s case it also narrows accountability.

The PM has made 38 foreign trips in under 18 months, all, of course, by official jet. Scheduled flights, even in business or first class, are not for ‘Never Here Keir’, though he used to lash out at any Tory minister who had recourse to private planes. The hypocrisy doesn’t get more pungent.

I’m in no doubt the people see through all this. The cancelled elections. The efforts to avoid journalistic scrutiny. The curtailing of jury trials. The desire for government to have a stronger grip on people’s daily lives. The obsession with strutting the world stage, usually to little avail.

Starmer thinks all this will restore his tarnished reputation and eventually make him electable again.

It is a sign of just how out of touch he is that, taken together, he doesn’t realise they merely underwrite his one-way ticket to the knacker’s yard, which is printed out and ready to be issued before 2026 is over.