Unfortunately, in a display of the awful, contorted political instincts that will surely lead to his eventual downfall, Starmer did something very different. The tone of a letter he wrote to Labour parliamentarians was self-righteous, arrogant, and deluded. No matter that Spencer’s brilliant victory speech lucidly reminded anyone listening of the everyday struggles that now tie together a huge swathe of voters: she was, he said, “more interested in dividing people than uniting them”. In deliberately targeting Muslim voters, in fact, she and her party had engaged in “divisive, sectarian politics”, an allegation with discomfiting echoes of the post-byelection poison being spread around by Nigel Farage and his allies.