To break one manifesto promise may be regarded as unfortunate. To break two in one week is not so much careless – as Oscar Wilde would have it – as par for the course.

Under Keir Starmer, the Government is entirely unburdened by consistency, competence, principle, ideology, vision or (above all) honesty.

No sooner had his Chancellor broken the Labour manifesto’s central pledge not to raise taxes on working people in Wednesday’s Budget, which was as much the work of No 10 as No 11, than another prominent pillar of Labour’s pre-election pledges – to give every worker full employment rights from day one – bit the dust.

Now a sensible opposition party vying for power would never have made such promises in the first place. But Starmer was not a sensible leader of the Opposition. Just cautious.

And so he pandered to Labour’s public sector and trade union base by telling them what they wanted to hear on employment rights and said whatever it took to allay the concerns of the wider public about Labour profligacy when it came to income tax, VAT or National Insurance contributions.

Nobody with even the most passing acquaintance of Starmer’s approach to politics will be surprised by these latest U-turns and broken pledges. The only consistent hallmark of his political career has been his inconsistency.

We can’t even be sure he’ll stick to his new policy that will require new hires to complete a six-month probation period (it’s currently two years) before they are entitled to full employment rights. It’s entirely sensible, even if it does fly in the face of the Labour manifesto.

But if Angela Rayner, his former deputy and author of the party’s job-destroying employment rights legislation, kicks off against any compromise, he’ll probably fold, just as he has in the past when ‘Big Ange’ decided to thwart him.

Starmer and strong, principled leadership have always been strangers. Instead, throughout his relentless climb up the greasy pole, Starmer has been the consummate shapeshifter, morphing into whatever political stance would gain him votes or popularity or bolster his position at any given time.

Of course, all legislators are guilty of political tap-dancing at some stage in their careers. But Starmer has taken the art to new heights. He is the Fred Astaire of the genre (which makes Reeves his Ginger Rogers) – and you can’t get better than that.

Starmer first came to public attention about a decade ago as a rather dour, robotic north London lawyer, with a deadening nasal drawl and all the usual Labour Left baggage members of that privileged and influential tribe carry.

Left-wing firebrand George Galloway claims that the Starmer he met in an earlier iteration was a ‘mutant Trotskyite’. I believe that. In the mid-1980s, Starmer was on the editorial board of Socialist Alternatives, a tiny, obscure Trot-inclined magazine that billed itself as ‘the human face of the hard Left’.

But supping the soup of International Marxism is no way to advance in the Labour Party. So, by the time Starmer had given up the law (where he’d risen to be Director of Public Prosecutions) to pursue a political career, he’d junked Trotsky for Ed Miliband, the then Labour leader. (Yes, I know, it wasn’t necessarily a sign of political maturity.)

Only too happy to be presented with such a professional, white- collar creature, Labour quickly parachuted him into a safe inner London seat. While Starmer won Holborn and St Pancras with a majority of 17,000 in the 2015 General Election, his party leader’s bid for Downing Street crashed and burned. Within months, Labour was in the grip of the Corbynista Ascendancy and Starmer shapeshifted further to the Left to fit right in.

He regularly referred to Corbyn as not just a ‘colleague’ but a ‘friend’. He remained loyal during challenges to Corbyn’s leadership. Even as he acknowledged the spread of anti-Semitism in Labour on Corbyn’s watch, he never blamed his leader for it.

Nor did he junk Corbynism, when Jezza crashed and burned in the 2019 election on an even bigger scale than Miliband had four years earlier. Far from it. He campaigned for the Labour leadership on an undiluted Corbynista platform.

I still remember a prime-time interview I did with him on BBC TV in early 2020, on the eve of the pandemic. He didn’t just promise – he emphasised ‘pledged’ – to stand by the whole panoply of Corbyn-style proposals, from bringing rail, mail, energy and water into state ownership to abolishing tuition fees. Clips of it still regularly appear on social media to illustrate how he became Labour leader on a false prospectus.

Starmer is not very good at politics. But even he realised what he had said to become Labour leader wasn’t going to make him Prime Minister. So the shapeshifting began again, this time in the form of a long march to the centre-Left, the ground from which he would fight the next election.

By the time that came around in the summer of 2024, his latest transformation was complete. Instead of the reckless Corbynism he’d espoused only a few years before, he offered a manifesto ‘fully costed, fully funded – built on a rock of fiscal responsibility’.

If you’re in need of a wry belly- laugh in these grim times it’s worth re-reading Starmer’s manifesto. Nothing would be promised or done that jeopardised ‘sound money and economic stability’. No massive taxes to finance a spending spree. That was ‘non-negotiable’. Just a few extra taxes on favourite Labour targets such as private school fees and non-doms, which would amount to under £10 billion in total.

The priority instead was to ‘kickstart economic growth to secure the highest sustained growth in the G7 – with good jobs and productivity growth in every part of the country making everyone, not just a few, better off’.

It is instructive to see these words in the week of Labour’s second Budget as they reveal just how far the shapeshifting has gone. Far from tax rises of under £10 billion, in only two Budgets Starmer-Reeves have increased taxes by a massive £66 billion-plus.

Instead of being the fastest growing economy in the G7 club of rich market economies, we have the highest inflation, the highest debt service costs on government borrowing (which continues to rise despite all that extra tax), the fastest-rising tax burden and the quickest-growing number of working-age adults on sickness-related benefits.

And, far from ‘everyone’ becoming better off, living standards are forecast to stagnate for the rest of the decade.

On his way to his latest manifestation as a tax-and-spend socialist, Starmer the Chameleon has scrapped the winter fuel allowance for pensioners – then reintroduced it. Attempted to reform welfare to get a grip on state spending – only to surrender to his own backbenchers by increasing welfare spending by more than originally envisaged. Insisted the country could not afford to remove the two-child cap on benefits – only to scrap it even though almost every economic indicator is worse than when he claimed it wasn’t affordable.

It is back to the bad old days of the 1970s, a time when Labour was in thrall to the trade unions and its tax-and-spend approach was last in vogue. Naturally, the country was brought to its knees.

Nor is there any mystery about why this is Starmer’s latest reincarnation: it is the blatant attempt of an unprincipled man to save his own skin with our money by pandering to the high-tax, big-spending prejudices of his soft-Left backbenchers, the biggest elected gathering of economically illiterate know-nothings in the democratic world.

Thus, in a 40-year career driven by self-promotion has Starmer gone from youthful Trot to Lefty London lawyer to Corbynista to a bit more Corbynista to moderate centre-Left social democrat to champion of an antediluvian soft Left, welfare state, tax-and-spend agenda.

In his new guise, he knows how to redistribute wealth but doesn’t have a clue how to create it.

And his latest piece of shapeshifting is the most serious. For it means Britain has a government for which it did not vote. The country elected Labour on a manifesto which promised prudent, centre-Left government, in the hope it would be a blessed relief from the Tory years.

But 18 months in, voters are now even more angry and disillusioned than they were under the Conservatives. Starmer’s metamorphosis has become a danger to democracy. A day of reckoning for him and his party will come – and it will be devastating when it does.