YOU’D be forgiven for sensing that the established order of UK politics was about to shift at the council elections. The week had started with what was described as a car-crash interview for Boris Johnson as he was skewered by Susanna Reid on Good Morning Britain. Ms Reid is an excellent journalist and as she interrogated the Prime Minister on his approach to Britain’s cost-of-living crisis it became clear why he had avoided appearing on this programme for the last five years.

Mr Johnson always begins his interviews with the bemused and bewildered look of a man who wanders into a stag party and discovers it’s a wake. Tuesday’s interview – like most of his others – went steeply downhill from there. Occurring so soon before Thursday’s local elections, Sir Keir Starmer must have been cheered by what the Prime Minister’s bumbling performance portended.

Yet, we’ve been here many times before. Only those who have never seen any of Mr Johnson’s broadcast interviews would have been surprised by Tuesday’s performance. And only the Labour Party’s most naïve and gullible members would think it presaged a disastrous Thursday night for the Tories. Judging by Sir Keir’s initial responses to the council elections he appears to have been just as jejune as his most credulous followers. On learning that Labour had done well in London, Sir Keir declared that “a massive turning-point” had been reached in UK politics. Is that right, aye?

The early trends indicated nothing of the sort. The scale of the Tories’ early losses were well within their strategists’ predictive models while Labour’s gains outside London were nowhere near what would have been required for a party with realistic prospects of displacing the Tories. Indeed, Labour under Jeremy Corbyn had fared better in many of these places.

In the two years since he became leader of the UK Labour Party, Sir Keir has spent more time and energy opposing Jeremy Corbyn than seeking to challenge Boris Johnson. Some of the more excitable of his acolytes, including his Scottish lieutenant Anas Sarwar, have even exulted about “detoxifying the party” as though this of itself would be sufficient to regain the trust of all those voters the party north and south of the border has lost in the last decade.

Perhaps Labour did require to be de-toxified but, if so, it doesn’t seem that the voters think that Mr Corbyn’s policies were the main problem. Indeed if Mr Corbyn had been more ruthless in purging Labour of all the Blairite betrayers who helped Theresa May to stumble over the line in 2017 he might have been left with a party much more capable than Sir Keir of opposing Boris Johnson and the Tories.

What Sir Keir’s predecessors wouldn’t have given to have had some of the opportunities he’s squandered? The Labour leader has been gifted a Tory Government which has been exposed as a mafia operation and whose senior officers have been repeatedly found guilty of flouting the law during a national health crisis.

Their insistence on a hard Brexit has made the cost-of-living crisis much more perilous for working-class families. They’ve refused to mitigate this with a modest windfall tax on some of the richest energy firms in the world which continued to make billions during the pandemic. And, as Mr Johnson demonstrates each time he blunders through a television interview he remains impervious to the daily sufferings of those worst affected by the steep increases in the cost of staying alive.

Yet, after these council elections, Sir Keir’s Labour is no nearer displacing the Tories than they were last year. And there may be worse to come. The news that Durham Police are to investigate the Labour Leader over his alleged breaches of lockdown rules may damage him more than Boris Johnson’s pandemic malfeasances.

The British public might revile a Government that breaks its own rules, but it holds a special disdain for hypocrisy. Sir Keir’s strategy as leader has rarely amounted to much more than holding the moral high ground against Boris Johnson. If he’s forced to relinquish this there’s little else left for him. All the Union Jacks and the expressions of support for the military and the royal family and working with Big Business have so far proven meaningless. These platitudes always sound much more authentic when Tories are espousing them. In the mouth of a Labour leader they merely seem performative.

Nor will the Prime Minister be concerned with the massive council losses sustained by the Scottish Tories under the inept leadership of Douglas Ross. For Boris Johnson, it’s never been a great mischief if Scotland falls. All that concerns him about Scotland is that support for independence remains static. Why should he care if Labour replaces the Tories as the SNP’s main challengers? Mr Johnson cares only that somehow the Union remains intact and, under the leadership of Anas Sarwar, Scottish Labour is little more than a UK Tory proxy outfit: nothing more; nothing less.

Curiously, the Prime Minister (if he even concerns himself with such trifles) would have been buoyed by the abject performance of Alba in Thursday’s local authority elections. That’s now two successive national elections in which Alex Salmond’s party have failed to make the merest impression.

It means that the SNP, having successfully bought off their boutique Scottish Green partners with a couple of junior ministerial appointments, will not be compelled to hasten their glacial and half-hearted progress towards a second referendum. Both they and their Scottish Green puppets can finally rest easy: they have another few years yet of growing their pensions and dipping their toes in Scotland’s vibrant rural second-homes market.

Nicola Sturgeon will, as she’s done following ten other electoral successes on her watch, proclaim Thursday’s council elections as another great night for Scottish independence. Scottish Labour will exult that they’ve been promoted from abject to merely hopeless. And the Greens will give thanks to their wood sprites for the advent of proportional representation.

Across the UK though, it’s the cause of true-blue Unionism which has the greatest cause to celebrate. The status quo will prevail for a good while longer.