From all corners of the kingdom they came, determined to have their say about inheritance tax. A sea of waxed jackets and jeans as far as the eye could see, and among the polite protesters stood their unofficial leader, risen from his sick bed to be there.

Jeremy Clarkson, TV presenter, celebrity farmer and now folk hero. He’s not been well lately. Had a heart op. But he defied doctors’ orders to stay home and avoid stress, so incensed is he at 20% tax being levied on farms worth more than £1m if they are handed down the family.

Cruel, unfair and will lead to empty supermarket shelves as farms go bust, say protesters. We need the money to fix the NHS and other public services, reply ministers, and it won’t affect that many people, just the wealthiest minority.

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Meanwhile, Tesco, M&S, Asda, and Amazon are among more than 70 retail giants to write to Rachel Reeves warning that the tax rises in her Budget will lead to job losses and higher prices. Day by day the list of organisations who say they cannot afford to pay more tax grows longer. Hospices, universities, small firms and big: they are all worried.

All we need now is for Sir Keir Starmer to be ambushed at the airport on his return from Rio de Janeiro. Funnily enough, Jim Callaghan was coming back from another hot spot, Guadeloupe, when he was asked about the protests spreading across Britain in January 1979. It was blooming cold then too.

'Sunny' Jim replied: “I promise if you look at it from the outside, I don’t think other people in the world share the view there is mounting chaos”. It was this, roughly translated, that became the headline, “Crisis? What crisis?”

Comparisons with 1979 can only go so far given the size of Keir Starmer’s majority. A closer match might be the fuel protests of 2000, but on a far smaller scale.

Yet in many ways the Starmer government stands alone. The wheels have started to wobble on this administration faster than even its fiercest critics could have hoped. The question is why, and what Starmer can do about it.

So much has happened since the election. It is as if the political gods, bored at seeing it all before, pressed the fast forward button and kept it there. Whoosh went the honeymoon period as rioting engulfed parts of English cities. Then came the row over means testing winter fuel payments, refusing to lift the two child benefits cap, and the cash for specs and threads scandal.

All of this played out while the Chancellor and the Prime Minister competed to see who could be most Eeyore-like about the state the Tories had left the country in. Consumers and business took the hint and the economy took the hit. Growth, supposedly the government’s top priority, failed to materialise on the scale promised. The doom loop kept on spinning while we waited, and waited, for the Budget. See how well that landed.

You can look at the run of events since the election and conclude one of two things. Either this government has been uniquely unlucky in everything it has done so far, or there are problems particular to it that need to be addressed quickly if the next five years are not to be spent in the doldrums.

Farmers protest in LondonFarmers protest in London (Image: free)For my money the problem can be traced to Labour’s time in the wilderness. When in opposition the team around Starmer did what every other government-in-waiting did - look around to see what other governments were doing. An obvious place to look was Biden’s America.

On the face of it, Bidenomics was a success. It bucked the trend for governments of the centre left. Biden spent, and spent big - upwards of $5 trillion - on major infrastructure projects such as roads and bridges. He invested and he intervened, and it paid off.

Except Biden did not get the credit for it. His approval ratings, never great to start with, got worse. Voters forgot about the government’s spending and started thinking about their own, and how much more they were shelling out every week due to inflation. Biden could actually point to his achievements, many now coming on stream, but it was too late. People had moved on.

What Biden should have done, went the thinking, was pace himself better. Run a slow and steady race, not a sprint. For Labour, this would mean focussing on a small number of flagship policies, house building, say, or fixing the NHS. Pour money and effort into them, and by the time of the next election (and the one after that), the gains would be there for everyone to see.

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You can see why this would have appealed to Labour, and where it has all gone wrong. Voters were led to believe the days of Labour tax and spend were over. Government would go on more or less as before, just more efficiently and without the sleaze and chaos. Reeves’ Budget changed all that.

Starmer and his Chancellor are now surrounded by a lot of very unhappy people, from farmers to pensioners, who feel let down, misled or betrayed. There is nothing the government can point to that shows all the pain will be worth it. No army of satisfied patients finally off the waiting lists. No delighted homeowners picking up their keys to a first home. Public sector workers are pleased with their pay rises but there is already talk of coming back for more.

So here we are, a country divided into the narked and the semi-content, presided over by a Prime Minister who doesn’t do politics very well. No wonder he spends so much time travelling. How much simpler and more manageable things must look at 36,000 feet. No noisy tractors and protesting farmers for a start. No bewildered backbenchers wondering what the plan is now. Just lots of time to fill and nothing to fill it with.

Time to come home and stay home Prime Minister; there is a lot to be done.

Alison Rowat is a senior politics and features writer on The Herald. Contact alison.rowat@heraldandtimes.co.uk