There comes a time, in the dying days of a relationship, when you start to become irritated merely by the sound of your partner’s breathing. It’s not kind, and it’s not necessarily rational, but it is what it is. Nothing they can do is going to fix it, and nothing they say makes it better – even if they suddenly start promising to do all the things you’ve been begging them to do for years. It all just seems too little, too late. And that is roughly where the parliamentary Labour party now finds itself with Keir Starmer.

His response to the bloodbath of last week’s local elections, in which he brought back Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman as advisers while promising something bigger and bolder than the creeping caution of the 2024 manifesto, was a promise to change aimed squarely at the MPs threatening to oust him and yet somehow it seems only to have deepened the frustration. Most would love nothing better than to get closer to Europe, as he promised; many have been screaming for months that, as he acknowledged, people are crying out for change to come faster. And the back-to-the-future appointments of two more New Labour veterans, to a team already groaning with survivors from the more successful 1997 to 2010 Labour governments, at least shows an understanding of where the plumbing is blocked.

Britain really does need to spend billions more on its defence, and if Starmer had said six months ago that Brown would be helping break the deadlock within the government over how to do it, that might have seemed inspired. Even when the idea of making Harman a kind of roving minister for rooting out misogyny was first mooted back in February, in response to fury over the release of emails between Peter Mandelson and the serial sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein, it might just have made a difference.

But to save these things up and present them now, like a bunch of wilted petrol station flowers, to save his skin? That somehow just adds insult to injury. If he had done all this before the local elections, MPs are muttering, perhaps it might have saved a few councillors from oblivion. Instead, he has somehow managed to make it look as if two causes he genuinely does care about – Europe’s survival and eradicating violence against women – are being cynically deployed to defend him, like human shields.

Whatever does or does not happen in the next few feverish days, the idea of Starmer ploughing on for 10 years (as he suggested at the weekend) feels about as plausible as Boris Johnson musing in June 2022 about plans for his third term. Within a fortnight, one last scandal had pushed Johnson into resigning.

This isn’t just political game-playing, or some hyperactive Westminster drama far removed from real lives. If Labour can’t figure out extremely quickly how to make conventional government work then Britain risks taking a very dark path, as Starmer himself said, and a Reform UK victory in 2029 isn’t the only threat on the horizon. The problem Brown has been urgently asked to solve involves raising billions to defend the nation against what may be a coming war, somehow without incurring the wrath of the bond markets or having to starve other public services in the process. And Harman’s brief is rooted in concerns among female MPs about what some see as a misogynistic culture in the party of briefing against senior women or failing to take them seriously, leading to a sometimes tin-eared response to issues around sexual violence that keeps accidentally undermining Labour’s manifesto pledge to prevent it.

They are not just angry at No 10’s failure to see the problem with sending Mandelson to Washington – though that will be back to haunt Starmer soon enough, with the planned release of yet more private messages between the disgraced former ambassador and his friends back home – but at things such as Downing Street’s clunky response to recent cross-party attempts in the Lords to curb extreme pornography, which initially involved asking Labour women to vote in defence of incest pornography depicting adult stepchildren.

They are acutely aware that Reform is actively chasing older women’s votes, trying to weaponise the emotionally charged issues of grooming gangs and sexual assaults by immigrants. They can see younger women, spooked by the radicalising content pumped out online to men their age and by the rolling back of women’s rights in the US, defecting in droves to the Greens. That the original proposal to bring Harman back into government has been watered down into an unpaid part-time advisory role, in which it’s unclear exactly what powers she will have to get anything done (though experience suggests she will find a way), is the final irony.

To some, a government refresh that involves bringing two 75-year-olds back into the fold will seem hopelessly backwards-looking. What’s wrong with the current generation of Labour talent, or with the prime minister’s own vision, that he keeps harking back to people first elected in the 1980s? So much has changed since Harman and Brown were last in government, running a country with money to spend, in a world where social media hadn’t yet set us all at each other’s throats and opposition hadn’t splintered into a bewildering cacophony of populists, nationalists and all-comers. Their names must mean little to younger voters, while for some younger MPs frustrated at being overlooked for promotion, giving jobs to grandees feels like a kick in the teeth.

For those of us who actually lived through the 00s, the desire to go back there is more understandable. Nostalgia is a powerful drug, and personally I would give my right arm to wake up in a world before the banking crash, Brexit and Trump made governing almost impossible. But there is something unsettling nonetheless about being reminded in this reset what, exactly, it is that this government has been missing. Brown and Harman come from different Labour traditions but they are both fiercely mission-driven politicians who know what they believe and as ministers found ways to push through change – she by building ingenious alliances with other like-minded women, he by a combination of brilliance and brute force – in the teeth of resistance. Starmer is very different.

Though he insisted on Monday morning that the days of managerial incrementalism were over, managerial incrementalism is what he does, and there was little tangible in that speech to suggest that is going to change. “I get it. I feel it,” the prime minister said. Unfortunately, that’s not necessarily the same as being able to stop it.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist