The news broke earlier this month that last year our planet breached the 1.5C limit recognized by international consensus as representing a catastrophic degree of climate change.

On the same day, the British Labour Party announced that it was ditching its flagship green policy, which centred around plans for £28 billion of annual investments in environmental projects.

This extraordinarily poorly timed announcement not only demonstrated the political agility of an inebriated elephant, but also reinforced a common perception of the party’s leader, Sir Keir Starmer, as a man who takes policy commitments no more seriously than Boris Johnson has ever taken his wedding vows.

There’s a sense in which this latest Labour faux pas is representative of its core strategic failing: That, in order to avoid causing any controversy that might confound its route to power, it displays a feeble tendency to vacillate which makes it appear increasingly unsuitable for that power.

This must be particularly frustrating for the party’s traditional supporters – even more so as this particular U-turn came less than 24 hours after Mr. Starmer had become “visibly furious” (as the BBC put it) following an especially crass remark made by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in the House of Commons.

This was, after all, the Keir Starmer that voters really wanted to see, but have rarely seen in recent years – a man of authentic political passion and righteous moral anger.

As a former lawyer, the Labour leader knows the value of a certain amount of intellectual pragmatism, but he should also be aware that it’s most often an appeal to the heart which wins an argument.

That’s why, for instance, at 97 years old, the veteran British broadcaster and environmental campaigner, Sir David Attenborough, remains far more popular with the general public than any British politician, even among those who may not naturally tend to share his views on climate change.

It may of course be that Sir Keir fears that, if he tries mixing Red and Green, he’ll end up simply looking Brown… and that Dr. Gordon Brown, Labour’s last Prime Minister, who lost to the Conservatives fourteen years ago – and who now looks surprisingly leftist and environmentalist when compared with Mr. Starmer – may not be the party leader whose style and success he most wants to emulate.

Indeed, it's been reported that Sir Keir’s flagship policy had been ditched at the insistence of his Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves, a woman whose dour financial prudence makes Gordon Brown’s own tenure at the Treasury seem exuberantly extravagant.

When one journalist pointed out that Labour had just rolled back on its biggest policy pledge just as the country's gearing itself up for a general election, Ms. Reeves responded that this abandoned commitment remained her party’s biggest policy. Sadly, that may well be true.

All this would seem disastrous for Labour were it not for the fact that their woes are dwarfed by the insane extent of the Conservatives’ disarray.

In fact, last week, as the country prepared for the latest two by-elections in seats vacated by Conservative MPs (one departing in disgrace, the other quitting in protest at the government’s reversal of its own green policies), The Observer newspaper reported that the Tories had “given up the fight”.

Last week, a cross-party parliamentary committee declared that the British government’s plans to deport asylum-seekers to the central African nation of Rwanda were incompatible with the country’s obligations to ensure human rights as enshrined in international law. A few days earlier, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had treated us to the unedifying spectacle of seeing him accept a wager from the oleaginous broadcaster Piers Morgan, betting £1,000 that the first flight of refugees would take off for Rwanda before the next election.

It feels like he’s been taking PR advice from Tory peer Michelle Mone, whose recent attempts to justify her lack of candor in previous statements about her business dealings stoked extraordinary public outrage, after a car-crash of an interview that made Prince Andrew’s pizza party alibi look almost watertight.

Of course, however badly the government does, the Opposition tries its best to do worse. In the run-up to last week’s by-elections, it was reported that Labour’s candidate in a third by-election, scheduled for later this month, had made comments which he himself later described as “deeply offensive, ignorant and false” – which may be common enough for politicians but is something they rarely admit in public. Although it was too late to replace him, the party then found it had no choice but to withdraw its support for his candidacy.

The Labour leader insisted he had taken what he called “decisive action”. It had just taken him a couple of days to do it.

Though the longer-term impacts of that particular controversy remain uncertain, the outcomes of last Thursday’s two by-elections – in the West of England and the Midlands – had never much been in doubt. The double victory for Labour was described by the BBC as a “thumping” result for the Opposition, and it was very clear that it was the Conservatives who’d been thumped.

But as the campaign towards a general election sometime later this year heats up, every result on the way to that fateful day – whatever its date may turn out to be – resounds with an ominous significance.

The fact that last Thursday Labour managed its second greatest swing against the Tories in any by-election since the Second World War will not go unnoticed in Westminster.

In the hours before the by-election results, both main parties had downplayed their chances of success. “The government of the day rarely wins by-elections,” said the Tories. Both constituencies, said Labour, had large Conservative majorities and were beyond the party’s list of target seats it would need to win a general election.

The sensible money has until recently suggested that Rishi Sunak, assured of defeat, will wait till the last possible moment to call that election. In recent days, though, there have been mutterings in Whitehall that, if his party gets a decent boost in the opinion polls as a result of a big tax giveaway in an imminent spring budget, the Prime Minister might just be tempted to call a general election before the summer – possibly to coincide with local elections in May. It’s also been observed that, if he fails to do so, the drubbing his party may well receive at those local elections might only serve to exacerbate the Conservatives’ downhill momentum.

The respected elections expert Professor Sir John Curtice suggested that last Thursday’s results told us “more about the way in which the Conservatives are in deep trouble” than they offered “an indication of the extent to which the electorate have necessarily bought into Labour as the preferred alternative”.

That remains an important warning for the Leader of His Majesty’s Opposition. As the clock ticks on towards the day of a general election, whenever that may be, the heat is certainly on for the Prime Minister, but the same can also be said – despite his evident electoral gains – of the sometimes strangely ineffectual Sir Keir.