“CHANGE or die” was Keir Starmer’s message to the National Health Service.

But it could as well apply to his own government, which already appears locked in a downward spiral.

Barely two months after the worst defeat in their history, Tory MPs are already feeling optimistic about a comeback at the next election, though that is admittedly not due for five years.

Opinion polls show that the popularity of both Labour and the Prime Minister personally are already falling. Starmer is heading straight from the honeymoon to the divorce court of public opinion.

The fault is entirely his. The Prime Minister appears oblivious to the weakness of his mandate to begin with, which has been masked only by the undemocratic peculiarities of the first-past-the-post system.

Labour secured the election with the smallest share of the vote for a new government in history and on a low turnout to boot. Barely one eligible voter in five chose Labour on July 4.

Starmer himself, moreover, saw half of his 2019 vote — and that was not a good year for Labour — disappear in his north London constituency.

But the only conclusion he has apparently drawn is that more misery must be piled on the public.

First, he maintained the cruel two-child benefit cap, and suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party those MPs who had the temerity to vote to lift children out of poverty.

Then he appeared in the Downing Street garden to announce that things were only going to get worse for the foreseeable future, preparing the way for that new round of austerity he had pledged to avoid during the election campaign.

His pretence is that “tough choices” are needed because of an unexpected “black hole” left behind in the public finances by the Tories.

But the choices made by Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Starmer are always “tough” at the expense of the poorest.

The latest catastrophic example is forcing through the cut in the winter fuel allowance in the teeth of a united opposition in the labour movement and great unease even among loyalist back-bench MPs.

This week we saw the bizarre sight of the Tories uniting to demand that Labour put welfare first, with one Conservative backbencher even lecturing Starmer on the meaning of socialism.

Cynical conservatives know they are on a winner. Snatching a benefit away from 10 million voters is hardly smart politics to begin with. For millions of them, the payment is a lifeline every winter.

And as the weather turns colder there will inevitably be stories of extreme hardship, and even death, caused by the cut.

In 2017 Labour estimated that means-testing the winter fuel allowance would lead to nearly 4,000 extra fatalities. Today, following exactly that policy, the government conceals the possible consequences, having either not commissioned an assessment of the policy’s impact, or determined to hide it.

It is said that you only get one chance to make a first impression. The first impression of this government is now set in stone — it is of callous cost-consciousness compounded by concealment.

This is not “fixing the foundations” as Starmer claims. It is fracturing them, and many Labour MPs know it. A good one hundred of Labour’s newly minted majority know that they would be lucky to retain their seats if the election was re-run tomorrow.

Of course, it is not going to be and there is time to change course. But the movement outside Parliament and the left within must unite to force that change and break the Starmer-Reeves adhesion to the priorities of the Treasury, the City and Washington which are presently dictating their direction.