Anthony Albanese and his British counterpart, Keir Starmer, may be separated by a hemisphere, but they have quite a bit in common: they’ve both taken over a battered opposition party from an electorally unpopular leader; and they each face a long, hard slog against a prime minister who communicates fluently with voters in marginal seats.

But while Scott Morrison is having a reasonably decent COVID-19 crisis, politically speaking, Boris Johnson is in trouble: there’s a growing sense, increasingly reflected in the polling, that he has lost his grip on the pandemic and is floundering about in the second wave.