LABOUR’S conference, opening in Liverpool at the weekend, ought to be a gathering of victors basking in their huge parliamentary majority.

Yet I anticipate angst. Keir Starmer barely rode a ripple, never mind a wave, into office.

Since entering Downing Street, all suited and booted courtesy of the largesse of Lord Alli, the Prime Minister has set about diminishing his standing still further, mainly by picking confrontations with the poorest.

It is an extraordinary act of political malpractice that, after less than three months in office, the new government is now shackled to two words most closely associated with the last 14 years of Toryism — austerity and sleaze.

Latest polling puts Labour at below 30 per cent vote share. That may mean little five years ahead of the next election, but the party’s benches in the Commons are jam-packed with men and women dimly apprehending that their electoral end is nigh very soon after their electoral start.

Most of them have glumly trooped through the lobbies to impoverish children and freeze pensioners this winter, with their leader’s inspiring message — things are going to get worse before they get worse still — ringing in their years.

I am sure the Treasury applauds their sacrifice, immolating their political futures on the altar of Fiscal Rules, but it is cold comfort. Many are now looking on this Parliament by way of a career break, although some are too callow to have had much of a start in working life to begin with.

However, if your ears caught a distinct “ping” coming from Westminster last week, it was the sound of a penny dropping in the vicinity of Downing Street.

As so often, the clue lies not in something that happened but something that didn’t, in this case, the failure of the Labour whips to do anything about the solo rebellion over the winter fuel benefit cut by the estimable Jon Trickett.

Clearly, Trickett must have expected sanction for his vote. Just a few weeks ago, seven MPs elected as Labour lost their membership of the parliamentary party for six months at least because they backed a Commons motion seeking to lift the cruel two-child benefit cap.

Five of the seven joined Trickett in the lobbies against the latest depredation, which has probably not assisted their chances of eventual reinstatement.

But why was Trickett not consigned to join them in limbo? The fact that his rebellion has proved highly popular with his constituents has little to do with it.

My understanding is that the decisive centres in the Labour Party — in this case, and many others, most likely Starmer’s political strategist Morgan McSweeney — have realised that they are leaving their left flank heavily exposed at a time when Labour is more vulnerable in that direction than at any time in its post-war history.

Certainly, McSweeney’s every instinct would have been to purge Trickett, just as he ordered the suspension of the child-benefit seven and the prior elimination of the Corbyn left from every site of influence in the party.

Like quite a few on Labour’s right, he is animated almost entirely by hatred of the socialist left. Changing society does not really float his boat, destroying the left does.

We learned this week that McSweeney’s main anxiety, while building up the factional Labour Together to seize the party back for the right wing, was that Jeremy Corbyn might win an election. Like much of his wing of the party, they wanted Labour to lose while it was led from the left.

But for now, he is bothered about the left consolidating in Parliament and doubtless outside, too. He is not wrong to be anxious.

Against most expectations, certainly including his own, five progressive MPs were elected in July against Labour. That in itself was four more than at any general election since 1945.

Only Jeremy Corbyn’s victory was in any sense anticipated. The five have now constituted themselves as a formal parliamentary group under the admittedly anaemic name of Independents Alliance, which one can hope is just a waystation in the direction of something a bit more pulse-quickening.

And the seven suspended MPs are a potential reserve of reinforcement. They include well-known figures, like John McDonnell, as well as the two outstanding Muslim women, Zarah Sultana and Apsana Begum.

They are not all of one mind about their future, and their prospects outwith the Labour Party would vary. Some, nevertheless, are “interested” in the new alliance.

It is not beyond possible that the parliamentary left of Labour could suddenly look substantial and interesting, particularly if the Greens, with their four seats, are factored in.

All this scarcely menaces Starmer’s parliamentary position, of course, and it would matter little if Labour’s electoral position was more robust.

But that is far from the case, as the results on July 4 proved. Starmer’s political chops and McSweeney’s strategic nous famously stopped well short of actually persuading people to vote Labour.

The headline facts are familiar — a fall in the vote of more than half a million from 2019 and over three million from 2017. The only increase in share of the vote coming in Scotland. The most attenuated mandate of any government entering office.

But the details highlight the challenge Labour faces. It no longer has to worry only about the Tories. In 87 Labour-held seats, Reform UK were the runners-up.

And in 56 constituencies, the left placed second, a category covering Greens, progressive independents and candidates of the Workers Party. While Romanian Communist Anna Pauker was removed from office in the early 1950s for simultaneous deviation to the right and the left, that is not a feat McSweeney is capable of.

By instinct, he will seek to appease the right, the Reform voters. And, lo, there is Starmer chatting migration curbs with the heir to Mussolini governing Italy.

Pausing consideration of the Greens, who contested every seat, the left came close to winning another half a dozen seats beyond the five actually secured. In a further 40, independents or Workers Party candidates polled well, saving their deposits and their dignity, sometimes by a distance.

Saving your deposit is a low bar, admittedly, but it is one nearly all left candidates have failed to clear by a considerable margin for decades.

And bear in mind that such candidates did not contest more than a third of constituencies.

That does not mean a new party is within sight of formation, misinformed media commentary notwithstanding. It is obvious that any initiative in that direction would have to come from the group of MPs, and they are not at that point yet.

Significant trade union support for a non-Labour party is also a long way off.

Nor is the strategy for uniting sufficient forces, and embedding a new party within communities, clear. Its putative relationship with mass movements is unsettled.

Solutions to all this cannot be sucked out of thin air, and most people don’t want to feel bounced. But nor do they feel shackled to a party in which just one MP out of 400 voted against a benefit cut which may cost nearly 4,000 lives this winter.

It is clear that Labour is more exposed to a left electoral challenge than ever before and is presently ignoring the first law of holes by continuing to dig most vigorously.

So, in Liverpool, delegates may be cheering “tough choices” to the rafters, but they will not be singing along in working-class communities.

The flinching cowards and sneering traitors on the platform may manage to lip-synch the Red Flag at the end, but the only thing growing stiff and cold will be the pensioners they are punishing to propitiate the City.

Dubai, see you later!

THERE is one thing we can unequivocally chalk up as a triumph for Starmerism.

The new government has apparently persuaded Charlie Mullins, the loud-mouthed anti-union self-publicist who used to run Pimlico Plumbers, that his future lies elsewhere.

To dodge the prospect of putting a bit more back into society through tax, he is contemplating moving to Dubai, where trade unions, his special hatred, will not trouble him.

He imagines that this is to be taken as a threat. I would be reluctant to add anything to Mullins’s pile of ill-gotten gains, but if he were to sell seats at Heathrow airport to view his departure … well, I foresee a surge pricing problem.