Keir Starmer’s right to demand an election but there’s just one flaw: most people hate them

You just knew Liz Truss was going as soon as she repeated Peter Mandelson’s high camp line: “I’m a fighter, not a quitter.” This is the one thing, the only thing, she has bequeathed us — the law of Truss. This states that every assertion made by the woman will be directly contradicted by her the following day, or possibly sooner. Her words are writ in water or perhaps something even more ephemeral. Ectoplasm?

She is not entirely to blame. The process that elevated her approximately 93 grades above her station was interminable and stupid and resulted in a fudge that neither the party activists nor the Conservative MPs wanted. Wanted in by, really, nobody and wanted out very soon by everyone. And now the Tories are going to do it all over again, and I wouldn’t bet against a similar misfortune occurring. Penny may be mordant at prime minister’s questions but she is not a Conservative. She is a liberal, a sheep in wolf’s clothing.

I would like Sir Keir Starmer a little more if he would, on occasion, burst out laughing at the sheer hilarity of it all, much as many of the rest of us are doing. I mean a proper, full-bodied guffaw, rather than the sort of gormless smirk sported by Jess Phillips on the BBC’s Question Time last week. I realise he has to continue to look pained to persuade us all he is a serious man, but, truth be told, I think we have got that now.

As I have mentioned several times, I think Starmer has been serially underrated and I don’t doubt for a moment that he would be a competent prime minister. He has purged the visible bit of his party of the infantile leftism that infested it under Magic Grandpa — the Hamas groupies, the Jew-bashers, the Che Guevara wannabes — and imposed upon his normally fractious rabble an injunction to shut up and let the Tories destroy themselves, a plan you have to say has met some success.

Further, nobody now thinks Labour is going to nationalise the FTSE 100, decapitate the King or replace the Union Jack with the red flag. He has grasped that the last election was lost by Corbyn at least partly on the issue of patriotism and is not above draping himself in red, white and blue from time to time.

He is still hamstrung by his party over wokery and thus unable to do what 97 per cent of the country can do without difficulty — define a woman. He was also minded to bob down on one knee, a briefly fashionable spasm of self-flagellation, and I think you can expect the Daily Mail to reproduce the photo of him doing so at every available opportunity. But he has played a bad hand very well indeed, and I find his often eloquent moderation reassuring — as do, I suspect, the bond markets.

Starmer has called for a general election, and there seems to me a very good moral, as well as practical, case for one. For too long we have had a government that believes the survival of itself is more important than the survival of our country. It has become arrogant, complacent, incompetent and now chaotic.

The audience at that aforementioned Question Time was almost universally in favour of an election, and the people in it had been carefully selected by the BBC to reflect the voting intentions that pertained in 2019 — so it wasn’t the usual convocation of embittered lefties claiming to be nurses.

However, people who wish to take part in Question Time are not representative of the population at large. They tend to be political obsessives, gripers and groaners. The large mass of the population, beyond Fiona Bruce’s reach, do not like elections for a whole host of reasons, not least the disruption to their lives that necessarily ensues and the perpetual bickering. Theresa May discovered that unnecessary general elections tend to rebound on the people who call them — and we have had too many national votes this past seven years or so. I suspect another general election would not be terribly popular.

Even if we were to have one, there would still be corrosive divides in both parties and no representation for the 50-odd per cent of the population who, like me, are economically leftish but socially conservative. Proportional representation is the answer — but then, PR creates weak governments, doesn’t it? And we wouldn’t want a weak government — heaven forfend. We want the sort of strength of governance demonstrated by Liz Truss, Boris Johnson and Theresa May, don’t we?

Meanwhile, the MPs are busily preparing for us an exciting new debacle. The Conservative Party is in purgatory and we are all in limbo.

• Calling your vile brats “naughty” when they misbehave is as oppressive as physically chastising them, says the parenting expert Navit Schechter.

“If you’re saying, ‘Don’t do that. That’s naughty,’ because you don’t like their actions — there’s this kind of implicit assumption that you have to do things the way that we want them done,” Ms Schechter explained.

Just implicit, huh, Navit? I have the horrible feeling she’s the kind of parenting expert who also thinks it’s wrong to tell a child a flesh-eating ogre lives under their bed and will emerge if they don’t go to sleep.

Truss relief for ex-premiers Only two months to ruin Christmas

Yes, Christmas is only 60-odd days away. They turned on the lights in St Ives high street, and shops are full of seasonal tat. Here’s the news you can expect to read in the lead-up.• November: a priest bans O Little Town of Bethlehem because the town is under the jackboot of Zionist oppression.

• Early December: a vicar, probably a different vicar, informs a class of five-year-olds that Santa doesn’t exist.

• Mid-December: papers show photos of tearful people who have been conned by a “Winter Wonderland Experience” that consisted of an acre of mud, a roe deer adorned with tinsel and a paroled sex offender dressed as an elf.

• Christmas Eve: people punch each other in a scrum at the sales. Enjoy.

C4 offers an idiot’s guide to Tories

I’m slightly disappointed the presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy has been suspended for a week from Channel 4 News simply for referring to the Conservative MP Steve Baker as a “c***”.

I can’t abide the smarmy hack, but I have long thought C4N should embrace honesty and tell people what it really thinks about interviewees who do not share its political views — ie, Tories.

All Conservatives dim enough to appear on that show should be introduced with a range of labels, including the one deployed by Guru-Murthy and encompassing “bellend”, “shitgibbon” and, for right-wing Conservatives such as Mr Baker, “complete and utter fascist twat”.