Allister Heath, the Telegraph's Chicken Little

Not for nothing is Allister Heath – a Daily Telegraph columnist and editor of the Sunday title – known in the paper’s HQ as “Chicken Little”, after the deluded poultry bird who feels the bump of an acorn dropping onto his head and insists that the sky must be falling.

Heath’s latest embarrassment is a typically apocalyptic piece headlined “Starmer’s staggering incompetence makes him the worst PM in 50 years”.

He writes: “Keir Starmer has been in office for only five months, but it is already clear that his government will be the worst in half a century. The die is cast: the prime minister is doubling down on every mistake, every prejudice, every tenet of the failed orthodoxy that has ruined Britain, probably because he is a true believer. He cannot and won’t change, seemingly oblivious to his abominable poll ratings, yet his inability to get anything right is truly staggering.”

Heath wasn’t always this unkind about new prime ministers. Rewind a little over two years, to September 8, 2022, and he was merrily tweeting about how “the critics of Liz Truss are wrong to underestimate her”.

Having supported her in the Tory leadership election, when he called her “politically brilliant”, Heath wrote: “Our declinist-Remainer class has outdone itself, demonising and dismissing Liz Truss, and working itself up into a frenzy of self-righteous rage and indignation at the supposed incompetence of her new government. Even for those inured to the extreme tribalism and coarseness of modern political discourse, the insults, double standards and prejudice have been something to behold.

“There was a time when, in the national interest, everybody wished new governments, especially those born in the midst of a crisis, the best of luck: today, the Left wages total war on anybody who has the temerity to disagree with the orthodoxies of our age.

“I’m optimistic about the Truss government. Yes, of course, nobody can possibly know how well it will do… but it is absurd to state, almost as self-evident fact, that it is bound to collapse, that it cannot last even two years.

“It is astonishing that pundits with no understanding of economics dismiss the prime minister’s ability in this area… she is more financially literate and comfortable with complex policy matters than almost all of those who patronise her.”

Alas for Heath, just over two weeks later Truss’s financial literacy and comfort with complex policy matters crashed the economy and her own premiership. By the end of her disastrous reign, her net favourability rating was minus 70, while Starmer’s “abominable poll ratings” now have him at minus-32, positively healthy by comparison.

A Telegraph source says: “Allister has never really got over Liz and therefore he can’t grasp that even Telegraph readers know she was a terrible prime minister. Starmer is awful and he could get worse, but there’s no comparison yet.”