SO IT’S back to school for the boys and girls of Westminster High - and the outlook for many is not as good as they might have hoped as they broke up for their summer hols.

Let’s begin with head boy Sir Keir Starmer. He must have thought that come the start of the new parliamentary term, sitting on the largest Labour majority for decades and facing a wizened Conservative Party, he would be embarking on one long honeymoon. It was not to be.

No sooner had Keir walked into Number Ten than anti-immigration (some might say racist) riots gripped parts of the country. On one level, as a former Director of Public Prosecutions, the PM was in his element - encouraging the courts to be tough in dishing out lengthy prison sentences to deter further disturbances. The tactic appeared to have worked, so it must have been a touch galling for Sir Keir, whose popularity rating was never particularly high, to see it fall precipitously.

READ MORE: Keir Starmer in Sussex: Labour leader makes 6 key pledges

Then there’s the seeming never-ending war in Gaza – it caused Labour enough problems during the election when candidates standing on pro-Palestinian platforms captured four seats from Labour. But if the recent decision to ban a small number of arms sales to Israel was intended to ease the party’s difficulty on this issue, then its denunciation by both the pro-Israeli lobby and the pro-Palestinian one – claiming it was too little, too late - must have been a disappointment.

But perhaps his biggest headache has been self-imposed. By announcing the ending of the winter fuel allowance for those pensioners not in receipt of benefits Sir Keir and Chancellor Rachael Reeves set the cat among the Labour pigeons. This was not in the party’s manifesto and his backbenchers, as well as local party members, are unhappy. I suspect that the coming weeks might see a rethink on this issue.

Given these difficulties, life should be looking a little rosier for the Tories - but it ain’t necessarily so, especially when your parliamentary numbers have been slashed from 344 to just 121. The Tories now face the unenviable task of selecting from a bunch of initially six (now five) candidates who is to become their leader. Although, whoever they chose has little chance of becoming Prime Minister after the next election. One only has to look at the subsequent careers of three Tory leaders who vainly battled Tony Blair’s New Labour government – none of whom made it to Downing Street.

The Tories are also facing a threat from their right flank as Nigel Farage’s Reform UK appears to be making the political weather on the right of British politics. Some might blame the Tories for the rise of Reform by their presiding over record-breaking immigration numbers while at the same time making it one of their key election issues. But by trying to emulate Reform’s appeal – particularly in their response to recent riots - the party paddles in dangerous waters.

As for Reform itself, now with five MPs, the outlook looks a good deal more promising. They undoubtedly gained momentum as, following the riots, the immigration issue stayed in the headlines. Notwithstanding, it’s worth observing that parties of the far right, and the far left for that matter, do have a tendency to splinter, as UKIP demonstrated. It will be interesting to see if Nigel Farage is capable of holding his merry band of warrior MPs together for the duration of this parliament. In contrast to Reform, the prospects for the Scottish Nationalists look gloomy. They lost a significant number of seats in the election – down from 45 to just nine – and they face the possibility of another hammering at the Scottish Parliament elections in 18 months’ time. Indeed, on the back of the huge budget cuts they have just announced, it is not inconceivable that they could lose power in Scotland for the first time since 2007.

The Liberal Democrats, on the other hand, have much to be cheerful about. In the 2019 election they won just 11 seats but in the July election that total rose to a startling 72 - their best performance since the party was formed 36 years ago. “What’s not to like” Lib Dem MPs can be heard asking themselves.

And the Green Party must also be feeling equally buoyant. Their representations in Parliament rose from just one - Caroline Lucas - to four and the Green agenda is now front, if not centre, of the Labour government’s policy agenda, spearheaded by the enthusiastic Energy Secretary Ed Miliband.

So as the pupils of Westminster High get down to the serious work of governing or opposing, we can only hope that next year’s Ofsted report for them does not read “requires improvement” - as it has for the last too many years.

Ivor Gaber is professor of political journalism at the University of Sussex and a former Westminster political correspondent