In short, Starmerism was destined to thrive in office. “Starmer instantly looks comfortable as prime minister,” cooed Philip Collins, his former speechwriter and now editor of Prospect magazine, after Labour’s election victory. “I always thought he would and this hard-to-define sense is part of the reason he is PM in the first place.” Instead, the Starmer premiership turned out to be the Fyre festival of British politics: lavishly hyped in advance, buoyed up by elite enthusiasm, and collapsing into fiasco almost as soon as it began.