But for how long? For the next three-and-a-half years, as he promises, or, as could well turn out to be the case, just a couple more weeks? The sight of him strutting his world stage stuff in Germany this weekend as though it were situation normal feels surreal. As our Political Correspondent Peter Spencer reports, he’s not so much keeping a stiff upper lip as practically biting it off.
Yes, the Prime Minister did neutralise a deadly serious coup attempt a few days ago, maybe even taking inspiration from lines penned by the late Victorian poet Rudyard Kipling.
‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you … you’ll be a man, my son!’
And sure enough, when the Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar seemed poised to topple him off his perch by saying it was time to go he did successfully engineer the panto response: ‘Oh no it isn’t.’
By getting all those sat round the, ahem, coffin-shaped cabinet table to tweet their backing he turned the Sarwar shafting into an eerie echo of the failed rebellion against Queen Elizabeth The First by the Earl of Essex.
This plucky but silly chap expected Londoners to flock to his side on his way to the royal palace. But when the word went out that he was a traitor everyone melted away. So he limped back home for a spot of lunch.
Last supper, more like, as less than three weeks later he had his head chopped off.
They’re not quite that visceral these days, but an astonishing number of top bods supposedly running the Starmer show behind the scenes have now run out of road.
Civil service boss Chris Wormald’s departure was supposedly amicable. But it’s no secret that Sir Keir felt the man goofed in letting him make Peter Mandelson Our Man in Washington.
If that was the real reason it was hardly fair, as Starmer knew all about Mandelson’s links with the revolting sex offender Jeffrey Epstein anyway.
Besides which, the late Margaret Thatcher may not to have been to everyone’s taste. But she was surely on the money when she said: ‘Advisers advise, ministers decide.’
Of a piece with a sign one-time US President Harry Truman used to have on his desk, that just read: ‘The buck stops here.’
All the more awkward for the PM then after he made former New Labour spin doctor Matthew Doyle a peer, even though he’d maintained links with a councillor accused of an unhealthy appetite for children.
To mangle a line from Oscar Wilde: ‘To appoint one paedophile supporter may be regarded as a misfortune. To appoint two two looks like carelessness.’
And the rest! Fair to say many if not nearly all of the barneys and bust-ups at Westminster probably leave most punters cold. But the really mucky stuff tends to stick.
Hence the following, spat at Starmer by a Labour MP who’d spent years working in child services: ‘People are screaming at me in the street that I am a member of the paedo protectors’ party.’
Which brings us grimly on to the Gorton and Denton by-election in Greater Manchester that’s less than a fortnight away.
Currently the Greens are the bookies’ favourite to snatch the seat from the Reds. Hardly a good look for Starmer, given that it’s been a Labour stronghold for half a century.
And how he’ll manage to make it down that mountain is anyone’s guess, as he’s just lost in quick succession both his strategy sherpa and his top messenger.
The now ex Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney slithered away in the wake of the Mandelson scandal. And former comms boss Tim Allen let it be known he’d had enough simply by changing his WhatsApp profile photo.
A thoroughly grownup and professional pic turned turned into an image of a club and a ball. With the cheery caption: ‘Gone Golfing.’
They’ve both now got little sprinklings of stand-ins, as has the departed Cabinet Secretary.
Which gives off the dizzying impression that Starmer’s more or less having to play Sir Humphrey and Bernard Wooley, as well as Jim Hacker.
As to how he’ll pretty up the party now that’s he’s got to do his own thinking, as well as writing his own press releases, there’s lots of strokey-beardie stuff going on within the commentariat.
But in the end it’s about as much use as all those Kremlinologists of yesteryear who used to tap the sides of their noses and tell us what was really going on in the Soviet Union.
And it’s all supposing anyway that Starmer doesn’t wake up one day and change his own WhatsApp pic to a set of moulded boot studs with the jolly motif: ‘Playing footie.’
That’s if the upcoming by-election doesn’t trigger another coup attempt, only this time a successful one.
A victory for the Greens could just be the tipping point. Or even, horror of horrors for Labour, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party scraping in.
Hard to tell at this stage how the outburst about Britain being ‘colonised’ by immigrants, from the filthy rich Manchester United co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe, will play on the doorsteps.
There has been a huge backlash from almost everywhere, on the grounds that nearly all immigrants to this country have come here to work, not to steal our land and/or murder us.
Also true to say that without incomers he’ll lose half his football team, legal immigration is now noticeably falling, and he got most of his stats wrong anyway.
But, as the old hacks’ saying goes: ‘Never let the facts stand in the way of a good story.’
That seems to be working for Farage, as he’s in the tiny minority of mainstream political figures who’re backing the man. Maybe with an eye to that forthcoming contest in Denton and Gorton.
But, to go back to the eleven-a-side metaphor, this could be an open goal for Starmer, if only he had the faintest notion of message-crafting.
Instead of, as he has been, sort of vaguely trying to neutralise the Reform threat by inching in the direction of its policy platform, he could seize his moment to really try and upend it.
The point’s an obvious one. That Farage, who’s been stoking racial tension all along, has now shown himself in his true nasty colours, getting his thinly disguised racism right out in the open.
It’d be a risky strategy, as it might alienate yet further that solid swathe of voters who’re telling pollsters they’ll vote the man in the second they get the chance.
Then again, with Reform so far out in front there’s surely nothing to lose by giving it a go?
Or to fill in the missing bit from Kipling’s poem quoted earlier: ‘If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.’
Well, that’s a bit strong, but for a man now written off as UK’s most unpopular Prime Minister ever, maybe his best and only hope is strip bare his image of decency.
Or, as Cole Porter once wrote: ‘In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. But now, God knows, anything goes.’
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.