A CONSCIENTIOUS, unglamorous type. The sort you could trust with the family silver, should there be any. A break with all the chaos that had gone before. Stability.

I can see how these things might have seemed attractive to a weary nation, but of course, they weren’t. Little over one in three of those who bothered to vote in last year’s general election placed their mark next to a Labour candidate. The lowest share of the vote to win an election since universal suffrage.

The buzz was as imperceptible as the judgement shown every day since. Last week, the Prime Minister, in a characteristically hamfisted sub-Alan Partridge promotional video, launched the second phase of his premiership with a frustrated nasal whine about going “further and faster.”

Millions must have heard this and thought “he’s off,” but alas, he still squats in No 10, dwarfed by the portraits of illustrious predecessors such as John Major and Ramsay MacDonald as he climbs the staircase two steps at a time.

Events, though, eh? I’ve heard a great deal of sympathy over the last few days for Angela Rayner. Everyone seems to agree she had to go; a housing secretary dodging tax on a house isn’t a particularly good look, after all.

The sorrow seems to derive from her being a target as a working-class woman and single mother. She undoubtedly was. We still live in a society where such behaviour is almost expected of her upper-middle-class male colleagues, but could not be tolerated from her, and that is manifestly unjust, but I’m afraid I do not feel an ounce of sympathy.

They should all be sent packing.

How anyone who voted repeatedly for cuts to disability allowances and to keep the two-child cap can think it is somehow acceptable to justify dodging tax on the back of providing for a disabled child is beyond me. People may relate to the parenting instinct, but the sheer lack of self-awareness is staggering.

To be a working-class woman in politics is certainly to be in the firing line, but there’s no need to assist the enemies of our class by painting a target on your forehead; there’s far too much at stake for such indulgences.

The bourgeois press loves Rayner once again now that she has resigned because they can point to a woman who grew up in real hardship, making it “to the top.” They now rest safe in the knowledge that that experience no longer offers the slightest threat to the system that landed her and millions more besides in that hardship in the first place.

A tragedy in more ways than one.

While the Prime Minister was embarking on phase two, Lord Peter Mandelson, as ever, was a step ahead of the game. He was busily preparing the ground for the third act in his decades-long resignation cycle, even going so far as to warn there was more to come as Sir Keir valiantly defended his excruciating notes to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein in a parliamentary exchange that managed to make Kemi Badenoch look dynamic.

Fun as it is to watch pundits who welcomed their pal into the premier job in British diplomacy just a few months ago stroke their beards over the last few days repeating the “questions must be asked” mantra, I doubt it’s much of a joy for Epstein’s victims; abused for years, ignored for years more, and pushed aside once again as they called for Mandelson’s dismissal.

Anyone with access to the internet knew Mandelson and Epstein were close, knew the relationship endured Epstein’s conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor, and knew at least of allegations that Mandelson stayed in his New York pad while his pal was in prison.

Presumably, the intelligence services were aware too.

If they weren’t, they’re not very intelligent. If they were and briefed the Prime Minister prior to the appointment? Well, that might just take us to Keir’s own phase three — retirement.

Still, the former human rights lawyer was able to take his mind off it by having a friend round.

President Herzog of Israel, a man who justified Gaza’s collective punishment by stating it was an “entire nation out there that is responsible … it is not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved,” and went on to autograph bombs destined to be used to tear children’s bodies limb from limb, popped over.

How apt that the head of a state whose government faces charges of a “plausible genocide” in the highest courts on Earth was led to the doorstep of No 10 for a meeting of the mindless on a blood-red carpet.

He’s not the first, of course, the list of nauseating visitors to Downing Street over the years is as long as the catalogue of crimes committed by their hosts, but we shouldn’t allow ourselves the absolution of shrugging our shoulders and getting used to it.

Nor can we allow that anger to distract us from what’s happening — or not — at the end of our street, in our workplace and community. The left rightly shouts about what’s going on internationally, but we have so far failed to speak of the connections between such events, the drive to a war economy and the deterioration of our everyday life in the language of the people we claim to stand for.

The TUC passing a motion on wages not weapons is most certainly to be applauded. It was no mean feat when a number of unions found themselves conflicted between the drive for peace long-held in the movement and the absolute first priority of any trade union — supporting workers, their jobs, wages, terms and conditions.

The speeches were some of the finest at congress, not least from my CWU comrade Tony Kearns, who brilliantly gave both barrels to the war economy. He spoke of how government war spending dwarfed any number of other public services, on schools, hospitals, on climate change mitigation, and how it was “using British workers to fly planes and kill innocent men, women, and children.”

“Using” being the operative word. Workers are either being used explicitly to aid this bloodbath, or bounced into it with the promise of jobs in communities crumbling after decades of neglect.

Every argument against the war economy, though, must be accompanied by a plan for peace and jobs — real, concrete, relatable — just as every call for a transition from fossil fuels must be, and every argument on identity must be rooted in class.

Most of us aren’t racist warmongers who’d see the world burn and countless more drown in the Channel.

Most at some point, as I did, see their loved ones cared for in underfunded hospitals by people from around the world and do so with endless gratitude.

Yet some still go home afterwards and vote to send those very people away and divert more cash to arms.

A righteous anger at a cosseted elite has been magnified by representatives who spend too much time cutting services, dodging tax, and defending crawlers to paedophile billionaires, only for that anger to be reflected back in chants of “racist.”

Then we wonder why the far right gets traction?

This just isn’t good enough.

Shouting at people — other than the most hardcore — or taking Starmer’s cowardly path by going with the grain on immigration and the need to freeze your granny to build bombs, both take us to the same place.

Rallies and demos have their place, but there are times when that buzz of excitement would be better sacrificed for the steady, conscientious and unglamorous work of building the understanding that can turn this tide.

We have trade unionists in every community in this land.

Rather than paying their bus fares for national demos, maybe we should support them to stay there.