It usually takes Prime Ministers a few years to lose their political antennae. In Keir Starmer’s case, though, it took only days. Removing winter fuel payment from all but the poorest pensioners has turned out to be a spectacular own-goal which is already making many people wonder whether the Labour leader will even make it to the next election.

On Wednesday he suffered the humiliation of losing a Labour conference vote calling for the reinstatement of the allowance. This was from the same delegates who only 24 hours beforehand had received his conference speech in apparent – and no doubt well-choreographed – raptures.

Starmer will ignore the result. It was a vote at a Labour conference, not in the House of Commons. But it is a warning sign that things are already beginning to go seriously wrong inside this government.

Not only was the original decision ill-advised, but Starmer and his Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, have made things far worse for themselves by trying to make out that the bond markets would have suffered a Liz Truss-style meltdown had they not announced the restriction of the winter fuel payment.

This is preposterous. One the same day in July that Reeves declared she had discovered a £22 billion ‘black hole’ in the public finances, she announced fat, above-inflation pay rises for teachers and other public sector workers. Since then, junior doctors have been awarded a 22 percent rise and train drivers – who were already on basic pay of over £60,000 a year – a pay rise of 14 percent.

Reeves has been claiming government poverty over the winter fuel payment – while behaving as if there is a magic money tree with which to reward the trade unions. But the bad politics of the winter fuel payment run deeper than that. The optics are so bad because when the Tories attempted to cut anything – even a pointless quango – it was always damned by Labour as evil ‘austerity’ which would kill people as well as crash the economy. It seems not to have occurred to them that this would rebound on them when they came into power and were handed the responsibility of managing the public finances.

Moreover, over the past couple of years Labour has taken every opportunity to blame the energy crisis on the Tories – never mind that the spike in energy prices was sparked by something entirely beyond their control, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Time and time again Labour figures used the tired old line about people having “to choose between heating and eating”. Did it really not occur to Starmer and his advisers that the line would be turned on them when they took away winter fuel allowance for pensioners on as little as £14,000 a year?

It is the same with the subject of sleaze. For years, Labour seized every opportunity to damn Conservative MPs, and the party itself, for taking donations from wealthy individuals. It was outrageous that Boris Johnson had had his Downing Street flat hung with gold wallpaper courtesy of a loan provided by Lord Brownlow. Starmer failed to see that having made such a song and a dance about donor buying political influence he would go on to be judged by the same standards.

Couldn’t have seen it coming, when he was awarding Lord Alli a Downing Street pass after the peer had helped to clothe him and leant him his penthouse? As with the winter fuel payment, the excuses are as bad as the original lapse of judgement.

We have hardly ever heard about Starmer’s children, the Prime Minister understandably wanting to protect them from the public eye. Yet suddenly his teenage son is being commandeered to try to get him out of a tight spot. It was his son who needed to penthouse in order to revise for his exams, and his son who wanted to go to all the Arsenal matches. Poor Starmer junior is already being set up in life as a compulsive freeloader, before he has even left school.

As for Sue Gray, what on earth is the Prime Minister on about when he claims that her £170,000 salary is not a matter for public debate? Sorry, but the remuneration of senior public sector workers very much is a matter on which we taxpayers, who fund them, have a right to a say. Labour eviscerated Boris Johnson for putting a political appointee – Dominic Cummings – to lord it over the civil service. But Starmer has done exactly the same with Gray.

It was clear from July’s election result that there was no great enthusiasm for Starmer and his party. Never in modern history has a party managed to form a majority government on just 34 percent of the vote. But the way things are going, even that lukewarm support is going to be lost at record speed.