Faced with more than two million people out of work, many as a direct result of her strategy to liberalise the British economy, Margaret Thatcher, toward the end of her first year-and-a-half in Downing Street, famously declared to her party's annual conference in October 1980 that she had no intention of performing any kind of policy U-turn: "To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the 'U-turn', I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning!"

This single-minded refusal to alter course in spite of all the arguments to the contrary – this determination not to change one's mind despite all the evidence and this steadfast and stubborn refusal to allow one's narrative to be diverted by actual facts – became something of a mantra for Thatcherite conservatism. 

It represents a degree of certainty, conviction, and focus which has often been equated with political and moral strength. It has also been considered by many to be symptomatic of obstinacy, authoritarianism, and mindless folly; the false confidence that grows out of self-deluding weakness.

Liz Truss, during her brief stint as the UK's Prime Minister, demonstrated this hubris in devastating abundance, as she insisted on plowing ahead with a fiscal agenda that shook the nation's finances to their core.

Boris Johnson managed for rather longer during his premiership to deny the reality of the increasing public awareness of – and anger at – his constant blustering mendacity and the web of fabrications on which he had built and maintained his power, in a house of cards that collapsed the moment that his senior Cabinet colleagues at last summoned the courage to call his bluff – as soon, that is, as the treacherous (or perspicacious) little Rishi Sunak, like the small child in Hans Christian Andersen's folktale, shouted out that their posturing emperor had no clothes on at all.

For most of his first year in office, Keir Starmer tried to ride out the tides of criticism in the style of Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair – another great pretender, a Labour leader who openly admired the Tories' so-called Iron Lady and one who is still openly admired by the current premier himself.

Yet, Starmer must have been aware all this time that both Thatcher and Blair were eventually brought down – and eventually became extraordinary figures not only (like Johnson and Truss) of great public derision, but also of general public contempt – as a consequence of their unbending faith in their own moral rectitude.

And so, we have seen, as Sir Keir marks the end of his first year at Number 10 – "marks" but, one imagines, not "celebrates" – he has, within a remarkably short space of time, performed unambiguous U-turns on perhaps his three most controversial domestic policies. 

The toolmaker's son, it seems, is for turning after all.

The BBC's political editor last month lamented the Prime Minister's "hat-trick of U-turns" as having come to appear increasingly "awkward". 

But none of these were at all unexpected. They were all the result of policy positions which, from the moment they were announced, were clearly going to be unpopular with the press, with the public, or with Mr. Starmer's own MPs – or with all three.

One of his recent U-turns has involved the decision to surrender to popular pressure to hold a statutory inquiry into the issue of child abuse gangs, a highly (and rightfully) emotive issue that had presented a rallying cry for the national press and for Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch – even though the last government (in which she'd served) had, like Starmer's administration, consistently resisted calls to launch such an investigation.

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It's unclear why Mr. Starmer had himself also resisted these calls, other than the expense involved – and the fact that there'd already been one such inquiry – although it opened him up to (probably unfounded) accusations that he, as former Director of Public Prosecutions, might have something to hide.

The Prime Minister likes to think of himself as a practical man (again, as he likes to repeat, his father was a toolmaker), and it may well be that he honestly believed it would be an irresponsible waste of taxpayers' money to hold a second inquiry just because the populist media had been demanding one.

But, as his time in Downing Street has so often demonstrated, he has very little sensitivity to how such things actually look in the real world.

It was the same when he decided to remove the winter fuel allowance for all pensioners, a universal payment to those over state pension age, regardless of their own financial means. 

He had reasoned that it was clearly unfair to pay this benefit to the very wealthy, but he'd failed to recognise that this little bribe for older people was clearly a vote-winner.

He had also failed to see that Labour, once the party of the working-class poor, had become the party of the relatively comfortable middle class. His own MPs might not love the super-rich, but they wouldn't want to do anything to inconvenience the moderately well-off in their own constituencies. 

Thus, an unlikely coalition of pragmatic Labour parliamentarians, an opportunistic opposition, and the braying humbugs of the right-wing press – along with the few remaining traditional socialists in his own party (who'd never say no to the prospect of a universal benefit) – eventually brought him to promise to reverse (or at least to water down) what had been his new government's first major policy decision – announced last summer, back in the days when it might have seemed that a massive majority made his authority unassailable.

Towards the end of last month, Keir Starmer suffered the third big blow to that authority, when a threatened rebellion among his own backbenchers forced a climb-down on his planned reform of the benefits system. 

Once more, there may have been solid evidence backing his arguments that overworked doctors have been over-diagnosing people as unfit to work (and therefore eligible to claim disability benefits) and that reform was necessary in order to promote the nation's health (there's a clear correlation between work and wellbeing), to foster economic growth (restoring hundreds of thousands of people to the workforce), and to divert precious billions from social security budgets into public services… but it doesn't look good for a Labour leader (one known to have accepted luxury gifts from rich donors) to be taking meager but much-needed sums of money away from people with disabilities.

Yet again, he seemed unable to see how a policy (which his rational mind told him seemed eminently sensible) would actually look. Starmer's brain may be in the right place, but, when his eyes aren't, it makes him look like his heart isn't either. 

In this age of personality politics, it can get you into trouble if you've not got much of a personality. So, it appears that Sir Keir – once criticised for his apparent lack of political conviction, then condemned for his attempts to stand by his beliefs, and now vilified for daring to change his mind – really can't win. 

This is the curse of contemporary Western politics. Plagued by the desperation of modern life, the public and press will protest against pretty much anything that's given them – unless, it seems, it's motivated by their basest instincts, if it simultaneously stimulates and satisfies an insatiable material greed and a populist appetite for hate. 

Sadly – with his recent forays into immigration debates – that's a lesson that Keir Starmer seems to be starting to learn.