What is the Point of Keir Starmer?

This is the worst 24 hours of Keir Starmer's leadership! Or, as the Simpson's meme has it, this is the worst 24 hours of Keir Starmer's leadership so far. The day didn't start great for the Prime Minister. Still reeling from Sunday's departure of our chum Morgan McSweeney, from out of nowhere the head of the dire Downing Street press operation, Tim Allan, threw in the towel. Whether this had something to do with weak vetting, who can say. He once handled press in this country for one Vladimir Putin, so perhaps it's merely a coincidence. Things carried on looking shaky for Starmer, before Anas Sarwar lobbed a bomb from afar. The Scottish Labour leader was calling a press conference to tell the PM to pack his bags. It looked like curtains, especially as rumours swirled that the Welsh First Minister, Eluned Morgan, was set to follow. Matters were uncertain.

Until they weren't. She denied reports, and then cabinet member after cabinet member came out to offer Starmer their backing. It ranged from a lukewarm "he doesn't need to resign" from Wes Streeting to the usual boilerplate from everyone else. You know, "he led us to a landslide victory", and "change takes a long time!", and "we have wonderful new breakfast clubs". Writing at the end of the day, it appears that Starmer survives. For now.

Ironically, this position of precarity confers on him a new reason for living. For Sarwar, calling for Starmer's head is calculated to salvage Scottish Labour's chances before this May's Holyrood elections. He's hoping that some oppositional cache will fall to his crew. I'm not so sure. After all, the few dozen Labour MPs who splashed their support for Brexit across their 2019 literature found it didn't save them. And the fact Starmer dumped Richard Leonard out of office so Sarwar could take over. Few other-party-curious Scottish Labour voters are likely to forget this, and will see it as cynical politicking. Something the SNP will no doubt remind punters of at every opportunity.

For the rest of the party, it's in no would-be leader's interest for Starmer to go. Wes Streeting has decided not to wait for the humble address and released his batch of toe curling messages between him and former best pal, Peter Mandelson. Likewise, Angela Rayner, who saved the government from an embarrassing Commons defeat last Wednesday, has to wait for the HMRC to give her "controversial" tax affairs a clean bill of health. And even those not immediately in the frame need someone to carry the can for the battering due at the Denton and Gorton by-election, and the May local and devolved elections. No new leader can afford to start their premiership with two crushing defeats.

Therefore, Starmer has use again. For Mandelson, via McSweeney, he was the marionette that would win the party back from the membership. He was then the empty suit animated almost entirely by oligarchical interests. And now that his days are numbered and the Labour right have suffered an historic embarrassment, he remains the tool of others, a meat shield whose sole purpose is to take the electoral beating coming the government's way. And when that's done, with Starmer lying bleeding and broken on the floor, that's when the up-and-comers will step over his body. Perhaps one of them will be kind enough to roll him into a ditch, but most are likely to not linger at the scene lest the miasma of poor judgement and failure clings to them.