If you compile a list of British prime ministers, Sir Keir Starmer is dated 2024 to blank. Plenty of people are predicting that date could be filled in any day soon.

What is it with us and prime ministers? We’ve had six in ten years. Rishi Sunak (2023-24), Liz Truss (2022-22), Boris Johnson (2018-22), Theresa May (2016-19) and David Cameron (2010-16). Is this country now ungovernable?

The booby prize goes Truss, who became PM in a Tory game of Who’s Turn Is It This Week Anyway? Then resigned 45 days later. Ever since she has peddled her own conspiracy theory about having been undermined by mysterious establishment forces.

Pull the other one, Liz, it’s got a fake moon landing on it.

When prime ministers go before their time, the fault often lies within. Johnson was undone by being Johnson, and because the man he paraded in public was a disguise, an inflatable confection, a blow-up suit of fake jollity hiding an insecure creature of deep selfishness.

But if all that applies to those departed Conservative prime ministers, questions must stick to Starmer, too. His weakness is that he’s never found a story to tell, politics being in part a narrative art.

Now I don’t particularly enjoy writing this. I take the mostly now unfashionable view that Starmer is starting to do much good. Business confidence is rising, inflation is falling, wages are rising, interest rates are down, NHS waiting lists are down, new breakfast clubs are opening in primary schools.

Starmer has also been successful at something I’d rather he’d not taken on so assiduously, and that’s curbing the arrival of small boats across the Channel.

The government is claiming to have stopped 40,000 crossing attempts since coming into office, and also to have removed or deported almost 60,000 people who were here illegally.

But here’s the shabby thing. No matter how ‘well’ the government does on small boat crossings, it makes no difference. Nigel Farage and Reform UK will still be light-blue sharks making a bloody frenzy in the water. And Starmer will get no credit.

All Labour prime ministers face media hostility. Starmer has been constantly attacked and belittled by the Mail, the Telegraph and so on, as is only to be expected.

But that hostility has been loudly amplified by the BBC, which also endlessly promotes Nigel Farage, letting him get anyway with anything and everything, even the other day bestowing an hour-long puff-piece by Laura Kuenssberg.

Starmer has also been unlucky in Trump. He’s faced an impossible task in trying to befriend the  US President, a man who has few if any friends and harms all in his vicinity.

It’s a pointless ‘if’, but if Trump hadn’t been elected for a second term, Starmer would almost certainly not have chosen Peter Mandelson to be our ambassador to the US.

That was a badly unwise decision. But the newspapers were quiet at the time; nothing was said in Parliament. Now everyone is busy blowing retrospective Westminster bubbles.

Everything here links and stinks in a most depressing way. Brexit, Trump, Steve Bannon, the inexorable rise of the greedy Tech Bros who want power without responsibility, billionaires owning and diverting the news, the cruel malign influence of Jeffrey Epstein, who was among those on the US right trying to overwhelm politics in Europe and the UK.

Trump knew Epstein well and is mentioned many times in the files. Starmer never met the sex offender tycoon, but his premiership could be ended by Epstein, thanks to that vile man’s links to Peter Mandelson.

What should never be forgotten here though is that the true story of the Epstein files lies in the girls and women who were abused, traded, passed around.

That is a topic better suited to a woman writer. I’d recommend Amelia Gentleman’s Saturday read in the Guardian:

“The Epstein files reveal a patriarchy in action. This is a world where the men are rich and powerful, and the women are not. The emails showcase the private behaviour of a male ruling class, as they network, joke and trade information. Women exist at the periphery, tolerated because they organise the diaries of the busy men, they arrange food, they grace a table, they provide sex.”

If Starmer steps aside, Labour will look just as inconstant and unserious as the Tories were. And the party’s chances won’t improve. Those on Labour’s left who like to moan about their own governments always forget that the chance of electing a truly socialist government is just about nil.

Oh, and if we have had six prime minister’s in ten years, six is also the grand total for Labour, starting in 1924 with Ramsay MacDonald.

I’ve only ever voted Labour, or occasionally Green in local elections. But you know what? I’m not falling for Zack Polanski, the showy leader of the Green Party. His opportunistic calls for Starmer to go make him sound too much like Nigel Farage.

And remember this. Farage always pretends to be what he is not, even down to all those visits to the pub.

I find comfort in a pint as much as the next man who likes occasionally to sup. For Nigel Farage a pint is a prop, a piece of misdirection in an ever-rolling montage of con-trickery. His new piece of economic illiteracy concerns knocking five pence off the price of a pint at the cost of reintroducing the two-child benefit cap.

Yeah, let’s raise a glass to Reform UK pushing thousands of children back into poverty. Cheers, Nigel.

As for Starmer, it’s a long hill but he should keep walking.