Or inaction? Take your pick, and don’t be taken in by anyone doing the knowing tap in the side of the nose thing and claiming to have the answer. In a few days from now the politicos and the hacks will have to cede all to the voters in the Scottish and Welsh and local elections. And, as our Political Correspondent Peter Spencer reports, there’s no guarantee of a rational response when the numbers divvy out.
No question, the figures look set to be terrifying for Labour. Polls are consistently pointing to them losing four-fifths of their council seats across UK and losing control of the Welsh assembly for the first time since it was set up.
All in all, this looks set to be their worst set of local election results, ever. Not just disaster but something closer to extinction.
And this inevitably drills the anguished question into the heads of the party’s MPs – if the punters hate us that much now what are my chances of survival at the general election in three years’ time?
It’s that simple, and that crude.
There is a theory that politicians are hard-headed beings who make hard-headed choices. But, as the old song goes, it ain’t necessarily so.
Look no further than the way a mother duck will square up to any old human if she feels they’re threatening her young. It’s not like she seriously thinks she can win, simply that instinct’s kicked in.
In her case it’s the mother bit, but the survival driver is not so far behind. Hence the possibility of Labour MPs, up to and including those on the top table, trying a Monty Python style blood-spurt-artery number on their leader.
That said, the arguments against anything of the kind border on the overwhelming. When top Tories finally gave Boris Johnson the heave-ho, their party rules meant he had no choice but to take the hint. And the hit.
Not that it solved their problem in the event, as the Truss-shaped upshot only hastened their demise. But at least they did have that clear-ish cut mechanism for replacing leaders, unlike Labour.
And that’s just for starters. There’s also the small matter of who takes Starmer’s place.
It’s blindingly obvious, however discreetly or otherwise they go about it, that former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner and Greater London Mayor Andy Burnham are gagging for a crack at it. Them and a fair few others, incidentally.
This of course only muddies the water further. Forget too many cooks spoil the broth, it’s more a matter of too many assassins spoiling the regicide.
Besides which, Keir Starmer would make the pretty valid argument that now really isn’t the time for an interregnum, given that there’s a war on.
To underline just that point he’s been spending this weekend with his European counterparts just thirty-seven miles from the Iranian border, trying to help untangle the unholy mess that the US President has created in the Middle East.
Polls suggest that the Donald’s war is now as unpopular with the American public as Vietnam once was. But that doesn’t prevent it plunging the British economy into a belly flop, dragging living standards that much further downwards.
Yes, King Charles’s visit stateside has so tickled Trump’s tummy that he’ll bin his ten per cent tariff on Scotch whisky, good news as the US is their biggest export market. But let’s get real here, it’s barely a tiddly drop in the bottom of the overall glass.
Starmer’s other argument against any attempt to kick him out is just how unfair it would be, given what a thoroughly decent chap he is.
He freely admits he’s made mistakes, as do all Prime Ministers, notably lately choosing the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s chum Peter Mandelson to try his snake-charming skills on the serpentine American Prez.
But here too, so far at least, what his enemies on the Tory side and in the media promised would turn into his very own Watergate scandal hasn’t lived up to its billing.
As Times columnist Hugo Rifkind impishly put it, the thing’s turned out instead to be: ‘Dull as ditchwatergate.’
And even the rabidly Tory-supporting Telegraph had to concede that the rebellion on the Labour side designed to help ensure his downfall was limited to the usual suspects.
We’re nonetheless still left with the biggest question of all. Having led his party to one of its best-ever election victories, how come it’s taken him less than two years to drag it into one of its worst-ever polling predicaments?
Without a doubt he’s been unlucky, taking over at a time when quite so many horrible people are polluting the politics of the world with their poisonous attitudes and behaviour. No names mentioned, note.
Whoever took his place, mind, would be stuck with precisely that problem. An argument against even trying.
Another being that, like him, they’d find themselves trying to lead a family which is not so much blissfully harmonious as riven with squabbles on multiple fronts.
This goes some way to explaining what’s looked like an endless success of juddering U-turns, as Starmer’s been forced to give in to so much pressure from different factions within his party.
Problem being that’s fed on itself, giving the impression that he doesn’t even know what he wants. And emboldening rebels to push him around all the more. And get away with it.
Taken together, it’s painted a grisly picture. Summed up in an excoriating think piece by columnist Nesrine Malik in the normally Labour-supporting Guardian newspaper.
‘At first he was sanctified as the Labour saviour, finally arrived. That gave way to pleas that he was essentially a good sort, new to politics and in need of time. Now an impression is emerging that he is, in fact, quite a bad egg.’
Then, the cruellest cut of all, the article quoted this from a well-placed Labour source: ‘Lots of people think Keir Starmer is a good man who is out of his depth. Wrong. He’s an asshole who’s out of his depth.’
Calls to mind an oft quoted and particularly ghoulish line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: ‘There’s daggers in men’s smiles: the near in blood, the nearer bloody.’
Definitely a mega ouch. Makes you wonder whether, whatever odds any possible insurgent might be up against, he, she, or they might drag him down like a ship sunk by a kraken-style giant squid.
But before you write off such creatures as mere myth, bear in mind the findings of a research team at Hokkaido Uni in Japan.
They’ve concluded from fossils they’ve found that back in the dinosaur age these creatures’ tentacles stretched to nearly twenty metres. That’s as long as a cricket pitch.
Best not be too hasty then dissing Jules Verne’s book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea as just a fantasy story.
And who knows? Maybe one day some palaeontologist is going to stumble on an ancient horse-like skull with a neat round hole on the forehead. Finally proving that unicorns aren’t a myth either.
Glorious thought. That ever since the dawn of time the clever kids have been right, and the silly grownups wrong.
Watch Peter’s report at peterspencer.org
Peter Spencer has 40 years experience as a Political Correspondent in Westminster, working with London Broadcasting and Sky News. For more of his fascinating musings on the turbulent political landscape, follow him on Facebook & Twitter.