AS Keir Starmer reflects on his first few months in office as Prime Minister and the increasingly dilapidated fortunes of the party he leads, you might be forgiven for feeling a degree of pity.

Well, perhaps not… but do at least spare a thought – however fleeting – for Anas Sarwar, who must be holding his head in his hands and wondering exactly what his line manager has planned for an encore.

The UK Labour Government took office on the back of great promises about getting rid of the Tories and replacing their corruption, cruelty and ineptitude with an approach based on respect and competence, all underpinned by the much-vaunted “five missions”.

READ MORE: SNP demand 'cast-iron guarantee' on tax hikes ahead of Labour Budget

Yet this past week, we have seen opinion polling which suggests that Labour and the Tories are currently neck-and-neck across the UK; that Labour are now less trusted on the economy than the party of Liz Truss; and that if a General Election were to be held tomorrow, they’d once again be facing a near-wipeout in Scotland at the hands of the SNP.

There are, of course, some pretty important caveats to this. Individual polls are just snapshots in time. UK-wide polls always have small sample sizes for Scotland bringing with them high potential margins for error.

Also, the last General Election result in Scotland came about for more reasons than people simply being more scunnered with the SNP at the time than they were with Labour.

Nevertheless, after weeks of scandal, unforced errors and infighting, it’s still a quite spectacular fall from grace.

As leader of the opposition, Sir Keir never showed much sign of ever being very good at politics. The first sign that he wouldn’t be very good at government either came after the King’s Speech when the SNP tabled an amendment on getting rid of the obscenity that is the two-child benefit cap.

Our amendment was – predictably enough – defeated, although it did garner substantial cross-party support. However, in what was Starmer’s first test on how to govern both country and party, he managed to cause a meltdown in the Parliamentary Labour Party, and gave the public at large the first glimpse of how little change his government is likely to ever bring.

Next, the Chancellor announced that the universal Winter Fuel Payment would be scrapped due to what she described as a “black hole” in the UK’s finances.

This, despite Starmer himself having as recently as last April described the experience of an 84-year-old pensioner in Dewsbury as “shameful” because she couldn’t afford to heat her own home.

And also, of course, coming after Labour had denied during the election that there would be any such looming black hole if they stuck to their pledge to maintain Tory spending limits.

READ MORE: SNP bring forward Westminster bill to 'keep NHS in public hands'

And then, to cap it all, came “Freebiegate”, where it emerged over day after excruciating day of reporting that senior members of the Labour Party had been accepting donations and gifts from supporters to the tune of more than £800,000 and that the party itself had accepted a £4 million donation from a Cayman Islands based hedge fund, all the while claiming that this would have no impact on government decision making.

Aye, right. You might say that their credibility on this has Cayman went.

Labour made entirely justifiable criticisms of the so-called “fast track” PPE arrangements the Tories made for their pals during the pandemic. But never mind their self-serving bleating about being held to a higher standard than the Tories – the brutal, simple, straightforward truth is that Labour look not only hypocritical, but in their entitled insouciance, they look practically indistinguishable from the worst troughing Tories.

Can things get worse for Labour? Most assuredly. I’m not sure certain what names the Met Office might have in store for any upcoming winter storms, but at Westminster, Storm “Rachel” looms on the horizon as the Chancellor’s autumn statement approaches on October 30.

Currently, Labour are impaled on a hook of their own manufacture over their pledge not to increase taxes on working people. It looks as if they are going to try to plug that fiscal black hole not by tackling the loopholes which benefit “non-doms” and reducing other opportunities for tax avoidance, but by instead increasing National Insurance on employer contributions rather than on employee contributions, all without significantly increasing investment in public services.

The trouble is, even though Labour can plausibly blame the Tories for the economic mess the UK is in and will get far too easy a ride in the media when they try to claim that the SNP is at fault for the consequences of Westminster choices in Scotland, this all just sounds sleekit – and far too like the UK Government they were supposed to be offering a “change” from.

I suspect this will be particularly so in Scotland, where Labour support the current devolved fiscal framework yet still demand higher and higher levels of public spending in Scotland, despite advocating for positions on income tax in Scotland which would immediately ensure lower spending on public services.

Willing the ends while deploring the means in this way only works until the voting public starts to notice.

And even Sarwar, with his trusty ploy of seeking to smother awkward scrutiny by talking over interviewers and opponents with a constant stream of word-saladry, has been left looking rattled and visibly short-circuited when forced to choose politically between loyalty to his master or doing the right thing.

None of this, of course, changes the parts of the SNP’s house which need to be put in order ahead of the next Holyrood elections.

However, there are worse ways to enter that campaign than with your main opponents showing themselves in office to be conducting themselves in exactly the way you always predicted they would.