Estimates vary. Some claim there were 100,000 people there. Others say that numbers exceeded 150K.

Whatever the final figure, it's certainly true that a significant number of people took part in a far-right rally in central London on a wet and windy weekend in the middle of September.

It was yet another wake-up call (along with the rapid rise of Reform UK) for those that fear the country is continuing to lurch towards right-wing authoritarianism – in this migration of broken souls towards an almost apocalyptically nihilist cult, a last-ditch gambit, like MAGA itself, for those who've given up all hope for the future of our planet and our civilisation.

The deeply divisive "Unite The Kingdom" event was organised by a convicted criminal called Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a thug who prefers to operate under the name of "Tommy Robinson", in honour of a legendary hooligan from his local football club.

He has a few of these things in common with the notorious son of one Alois Schicklgruber, another violent racist ex-con who'd demonstrated some ability at rallying nationalist sentiments among mobs of the hate-filled and the dispossessed nearly a century ago.

Yaxley-Lennon's rally resulted in injuries to 26 police officers and the arrests of 24 demonstrators. It also welcomed a virtual address by none other than Elon Musk, the Hollywood-villain billionaire who earlier this year grew so egomaniacal and unhinged that he proved too loose a cannon even to keep his place in the crazy world of the Trump administration.

Mr. Musk's widely criticised speech denounced the "woke mind virus" and condemned the political left as "the party of murder", as he called for the dissolution of the Westminster parliament and a change of UK government.

In what some have called an incitement to violent insurrection, he had added: "Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die."

The leader of the UK’s Liberal Democrats described this attempt “to sow violence and discord on our streets” as “a serious and dangerous interference in our democracy”.

Musk's latest angry outburst appeared – at least to some extent – to have been triggered by the recent murder of the radical-right campaigner Charlie Kirk by Tyler Robinson, a young man whose ideologies appear to have diverged to more violent extremes from those of his Trump-loving conservative family in Utah.

Reports have surfaced – and have even been carried by the right-wing Telegraph newspaper – as to his possible connections with the ultra-right ‘Groyper Army’ – which had previously attacked Kirk’s views on such subjects as race as being too moderate. Yet it remains unclear whether this other Mr. Robinson’s actions were motivated by ideology or mental illness.

Left-wing politics may make a convenient scapegoat for the likes of Elon Musk to explain away this act of senseless violence, one which only exacerbates the increasingly unbridgeable schisms which divide the United States – but in truth the root causes of such insanity are those fundamental polarisations which have been exploited and exaggerated by an extremist, opportunist and capricious Oval Office, an administration which has normalised expressions of hatred once considered unacceptable through a disregard for factual truth and a perversion of the news narrative into a self-serving fantasy.

Thus, the Vice-President of the United States chose to respond to Kirk’s murder by declaring that “while our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the Far Left,” before going on to pledge a crackdown against what he called the “festering violence” of his political opponents.

In this febrile and volatile climate, we may never discover the truth. We can only be certain that those things that America’s leaders call “statistical facts” really don’t seem to be as reliable as they once were... as we see US TV networks cowed by MAGA threats into censoring their own voices of dissent.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, as in the US, the very engineers of our national socioeconomic crises continue to use the fallout from those crises to bolster their power. The architects of Brexit and the advocates of Liz Truss's brief but catastrophic fiscal intervention – whether the Daily Mail or Telegraph newspapers, or Nigel Farage's manic gammon minions – are those who are most vociferously calling for the fall of the current Labour government, blaming it for those same financial calamities which their own kamikaze policies brought about.

Of course, it’s not all the fault of the Radical Right. The repeated missteps of Keir Starmer's premiership haven't themselves helped to boost public confidence in the future health and wealth of the nation.

Sir Keir appears to have entered office last year labouring under the possibly fatal misapprehension that he would enjoy the kind of popularity enjoyed by Tony Blair during his first few years in Downing Street.

But Mr. Starmer had failed to see that, despite his massive parliamentary majority, he wasn't elected with enthusiastic acclaim as the country's most popular choice, but as the least-worst option following a series of appallingly poor Conservative Prime Ministers.

He had also neglected to recognise that many across the country are sick of being patronised by what they see as the empty promises and platitudes of mainstream politics, and that they wouldn't be particularly impressed by his cautious, non-confrontational, commitment-free, action-lite approach – which involved at least a year of planning before moving towards what he's now calling the delivery stage.

It turns out that many of our citizens want our leaders to show real convictions, even if they happen to be criminal ones. Many people want politicians to do things, even if the actual things they do turn out to be counterproductive, regressive and self-damaging. We want to feel like we're going somewhere, led by women and men of action, people like Johnson, Trump, Vance, Truss, Farage and, in extremis, Yaxley-Lennon, even though their actions are insane and we know we're heading into hell.

Meanwhile, the open antagonism of the right-wing press hasn't of course helped Starmer's government – its concerted campaign to dislodge his Deputy Prime Minister representing their biggest victory so far.

Yet perhaps his biggest enemy has been the mainstream media – and most obviously the BBC, which, in chasing ratings, has granted the populist Nigel Farage amounts of airtime intensely disproportionate to his levels of parliamentary support, and which now highlights and foments the vaguest rumblings of backbench dissent against the current government.

The Liberal Democrats – which have 18 times the number of MPs boasted by Reform – have this year received a third less BBC News coverage than Farage’s party. New research by scholars at Cardiff University has also highlighted the BBC’s repeated failure to challenge Reform UK’s more outrageous claims.

The public broadcaster did a remarkably similar thing in its decade-long promotion of Boris Johnson's political career, and just about lived to regret it. If its unprecedented coverage pushes Nigel Farage into power, it may well find that his first act is to abolish it.

The BBC's attempts to placate the radical right by giving them an endless supply of the oxygen of publicity – just as CNN did with Trump – are reflected in Starmer's repeated attempts to appease supporters of Reform UK by trying to design increasingly isolationist immigration policies.

Related News

News from Nowhere: Angela's Ashes

News from Nowhere: Local difficulties

What he doesn't understand is that Farage's xenophobic fans will never vote Labour because they aren't interested in the reasonable and evidence-based arguments advanced by those they see as representing an established liberal elite, and because they aren't interested in the immigration statistics (which have fallen significantly over the last year),  because immigrants are merely an arbitrary target for their accumulated anger. If it wasn't immigrants, it would be the woke left (which it also often is), or the European Union (which it once was), or for that matter people who don't display national flags outside their homes, or who don't eat meat or who think we should plant more trees.

Of course, as well as being the product of the forces stacked against him, some of Keir Starmer's political wounds are self-inflicted. His approach to politics often looks like the arrogance of a leader who believes that cold logic should take precedence over the heat of emotion – and who can't see that this isn't how politics works.

You'll never appeal to your electorate by taking winter fuel payments away from pensioners (even if you're trying to take them away from the richer pensioners). You'll never gain credibility in the Labour heartlands by making it more difficult to claim disability benefits – even if some of those benefits have been going to people in well-paid jobs, and even if you believe some of those benefits have kept relatively able-bodied (but over-diagnosed) people out of work.

You’ll never gain praise for accepting luxury gifts from wealthy donors while taking cash from the pockets of people a lot less well-off than you are.

(It's not rocket science. It's just, as Blair once knew, the politics of perception.)

And you'll never make anyone happy if you give your most important diplomatic role to a wily operator who once had a close friendship with a convicted sex-offender. Not even if his job is to cosy up to the American president (to secure a trade deal) – and not even if the said American president was also thought to have once been on friendly terms with the same man.

The week after Mr. Starmer was eventually forced to fire his ambassador to Washington, the UK played host to an unprecedented second state visit from that American president.

The occasion of his previous state visit six years ago has been marked by a petition, signed by a million citizens, saying he shouldn’t be granted the honour.

Ahead of the president’s latest visit, protesters unfurled a massive photograph of Mr. Trump in the company of his old chum, the notorious sex offender, in the grounds of Windsor Castle – and then projected huge images of the unwholesome pair onto the walls of the royal residence.

Thousands of demonstrators also took peacefully to the streets of London to voice their opposition to Donald Trump’s visit – and to show that the Far Right don’t hold the monopoly on protests designed to embarrass Keir Starmer’s government.

The anti-Trump protests were even joined by a former editor of the Daily Telegraph. The presence of this veteran conservative journalist clearly demonstrated that the mainstream opposition to the rise of ultra-nationalist extremism is no longer merely a matter of right versus left, but is now seen by many as a case of right versus wrong.

But this curious confluence of spectacular events and spectacular scandals leads us towards Starmer's third big problem. It's not just that he's overestimated his popularity and underestimated the extent of the animosity many feel towards him or may seek to exploit. And it's not just that he seems unable to appreciate the politics is about how things look and how people feel – and that a lot of economics is too.

It's that, despite all his cunning calculations, he can also be pretty unlucky – unlucky enough to lose his ambassador to the United States in a scandal whose implications have resonated from Westminster to Washington and back again, just at the moment that the American president – a person also implicated in that controversy – came to the UK to pay a visit that had begun to seem rather less of a diplomatic masterstroke than it had been intended to be.

It should be admitted, however, that the Cheeto-complexioned controversialist’s visit could have gone a lot worse. For one thing, he ignored the jibes as to the limited extent of his moral probity. And, for another, nobody seemed to mind when he broke protocol – just as he had on his first state visit – we walked in front of the monarch when they were supposed to be inspecting the guard.

No one mentioned the fact that the spectral figure of the First Lady seemed determined to hide beneath the broad brim of her hat. And, for once, the leaders’ press conference didn’t descend into the president’s standard salvo of petty recriminations.

In fact, Mr. Trump (apparently still wowed by the flattery of his day with the King) even adopted an uncharacteristically respectful tone when he agreed to differ on the Prime Minister’s decision to recognise the state of Palestine, formally confirmed a few days later at the UN.

Starmer was certainly lucky on that point... and has continued to be fortunate that this unusually honest (even brave) piece of statesmanship seems to have gone down well with many people – apart, of course, from Nigel Farage.

Yet it still appears to be the case that, being a pragmatic rationalist who'd bet the house on the supremacy of reason, Sir Keir can't accept that in the world of politics luck – pure random chance – often plays the most vital part.

Some things simply cannot be anticipated. When, five years ago, Nigel Farage had tweeted about its eightieth anniversary, the surviving family of one of the most celebrated airmen who fought in the Battle of Britain surprised the arch-Brexiteer when they responded that they considered Mr. Farage to be "an absolute disgrace".

Sometimes, after all, we just have to stand up and do the right thing.

Responding to Robinson's rally – and the recent plague of St George's Crosses being daubed across the nation's roundabouts – Keir Starmer has said that the UK will never surrender its flag to those who seek to propagate hatred: "Britain is a nation proudly built on tolerance, diversity and respect. Our flag represents our diverse country and we will never surrender it to those that use it as a symbol of violence, fear and division."

Shortly after he arrived in Number 10, Starmer had come down hard on a wave of anti-immigration riots which had broken out across the country. Although it aggravated those on the Far Right, his uncharacteristically firm (even courageous) stance reassured those who care about law, order and the maintenance of peace on our streets – and who are horrified by the possibility of the resurgence of fascism.

For, just as politics is about luck, it's also about pluck – and it's high time, in this struggle for the nation's soul, that the Prime Minister backed up his words with the courage of a brand of political leadership willing to challenge these dangerous extremists – from Tommy Robinson to Tyler Robinson – and to confront the fraudulent narratives peddled by the likes of Farage, Trump and Vance, and to call them out for what they are.

This notoriously risk-averse politician must accept that there must be risk wherever there is chance, that nobody’s more unpopular than the person who wants to be everyone’s best friend, and that few things in politics can be as dangerously self-defeating as always trying to play it safe.

He needs to show the kind of commitment to fighting fascism at home that he now seems willing to start to demonstrate, at least in words, in opposing violent oppression overseas.

That, Mr. Starmer, is the only way you might turn things around... by doing what’s right, by embracing that risk, by taking that chance.