What an awful start it has been for this Government. In little more than seven months, Labour have gone from the highs of a landslide victory to the doldrums of being the most unpopular new Government in history.

Unnecessary policy choices, incomprehensible fights with marginal groups, betrayals and economic stagnation characterised its first 227 days. Worse than that was the killing of any hope and positivity.

All Labour had to be after 14 miserable years was not the Tories! Instead of creating a feel-good factor following their election they proclaimed that things were going to get worse, and all they had to offer was even more pain. New governments get one chance to set a mood, and Labour blew it.

When I was elected in 2001, Tony Blair had just secured his second landslide majority. I remember looking across at the Labour benches at the sheer range of forces pitted against us.

Overwhelmingly popular, masters of everything they surveyed, their front bench was stuffed to the gunnels full of political talent.

To the fore were the Scottish Labour MPs, among them Robin Cook, Gordon Brown, Tam Daylell, John Reid and Alasdair Darling, to name but a few. Sitting there with our little SNP group of five, we seemed a long way from government and even further from an independence referendum.

Looking across the floor this time round is very different. Instead of the confidence and swagger of the early Blair years, you see a Government afraid of itself, uncertain and already reaching the stage of not so quiet desperation.

There doesn’t seem to be the same intellectual heft, the ambition or the determination in their ranks. What I sense is more about getting through the day rather than changing the country.

The Scottish contribution to the new Government is also severely limited. Granted, nearly all of them are new, but it’s hard to detect the next Robin Cook or Gordon Brown, and I suspect most Scots would find it hard to name three Scottish Labour MPs. Their one job is to provide the whips with the votes they need, which they do (with one honourable exception) without complaint or protest.

Lost in an uncomfortable, unforgiving political environment they waste the few opportunities they have to ask questions about the Scottish Government rather than the one which sits directly in front of them.

And they have had a miserable start to their political careers. Very few of them signed up for this. They headed down to Westminster believing they were going to embody the change they endlessly talked about. They were no doubt full of dreams of reinvigorating Britain, restoring trust in politics and fixing out the country after 14 miserable Tory years.

Most of the new Scottish Labour MPs I have met seem to be genuine, personable and committed parliamentarians. But most of them must be wondering, ‘How did I end up here, with this?’ Things are so bad that we have now reached relaunch central where agendas are rewritten, strategies renewed and political straws grabbed at.

In the last few weeks alone, AI/deregulation/a new Heathrow runway have all variously been the new economic panaceas. Desperate to reset the mood and find the growth they promised to deliver, Labour ooze desperation. Their problem is they totally and utterly boxed themselves in with their own fiscal rules while being committed to investing in public services.

They had to deliver a Budget with practically no fiscal tools at their disposal and were left with next to no means that they hadn’t already denied themselves.

That left employers’ National Insurance contributions as the only significant lever still available, and reaching for this has been a disaster. Nothing was going to choke off and constrain growth more than taxing employers even more.

The one logical and practical way out of all of this has also been self-denied – a return to the European Union, or at least the customs union and the single market. Caught between the needs to pander to the basest political instincts in Eurosceptic “red wall” seats and the practicalities of the economy, the fear of Farage won out.

It doesn’t matter how many opinion polls tell Labour that rejoining the EU is now a popular majority choice across the UK, the party is so captured by its antipathy towards the EU that no real rapprochement is possible.

Instead they endlessly talk of a meaningless “reset” which is nothing more than the vain hope that the EU might take pity on them and give them some sort of concession for nothing in return.

The result is no economic growth, high inflation, growing unemployment with the largest deficit the UK has ever experienced. Things are bad. Really bad.

Already there are talks about the Prime Minister’s and Chancellor’s future and unless we see some tangible improvements this will only grow. To complete the political cycle of doom the only thing that is still missing is a Labour leadership crisis. That may already be in the post.

In Scotland, the UK party has undermined Anas Sarwar’s seemingly unstoppable progress to Bute House. Scotland has now seen Labour in power and it does not like what it sees, one bit.

Anas almost had the keys in his hand, only for them to be snatched away by Starmer and his Waspi betrayal, pensioner bashing and the two-child benefit cap.

After failing to exert any influence over the UK party, Scottish Labour will now try to promote the nonsense that somehow they and UK Labour are different beasts.

This leaves Scottish Labour MPs in an almost intolerable situation. Scottish Labour but not quite Scottish Labour, beholden to whips at Westminster but still being mandated by the machinations of Scottish Labour. How they feel about absorbing all this blame while waiting for their almost certain dismissal at the next General Election is anybody’s guess.

It would almost certainly be curtains for them if they went along with this and how the relationship between Labour’s two parliamentary groups unfolds will be one of the most entertaining features of the next few years.

Of course, Labour might still get beyond this. Political luck and a fair economic wind might come along. But the signs are not good. The weather coming across the Atlantic is at best stormy and a worldwide slowdown on the back of the whims of an eccentric and unpredictable US president is much more likely.

Labour also do not have the political guile, the economic know-how or the wherewithal to turn this round. They also seemingly can’t help themselves when it comes to upsetting groups that they pledged to support.

Non-doms are the latest to be let off the hook as the Government instead goes after the fabled “benefit cheats”.

People will look back at the first few months of this Labour Government as a textbook example of what not to do when a new Government comes to power.

I know we’ve still a long way to go until the termination of this parliamentary term, but for many of them already it can’t come soon enough.