It’s not just a shake-up oop north that’s got tongues wagging, it’s the uncertainty facing the rest of us. And to crown it all the future of the monarchy’s looking a tad sketchy too. As our Political Correspondent Peter Spencer reports, about the only thing that doesn’t seem on the cards is the heave-ho for the Prime Minister. At least not for the moment.
To get the basics out of the way, Labour only got a quarter of the votes in last week’s by-election in the Greater Manchester towns of Gorton and Denton. While the Greens picked up getting on for half of them.
So much for it being one of the reds’ safest seats. But so much also for Reform’s turquoise tribe smashing it. Nigel Farage’s lot didn’t do much better than Starmer’s.
Of course poor Keir’s got to own it. The fact that he showed his face on the campaign trail a few days ago shows how wrong he called it. Won’t be the first or the last time he’s shown the political instincts of an insect.
But for his lot to chuck him out now would be like scuttling the ship as it’s heading towards a hurricane.
They may well head for the lifeboats anyway if the town hall elections in May are just as bad. But between now and then they do have the chance to change course while they still can.
And if Thursday night’s crushing defeat tells us anything it’s that their ongoing appeasement of Reform’s right-wing credo was a fail.
Little wonder as the blame game blares on that former Deputy Prime Minister and current Starmer basher-in-chief Angela Rayner was the first to say he needs to wake up and smell the coffee.
Though Farage puts it a bit more politely, his fave thing is grumbling about so many smelly foreigners kicking about the place.
And, presumably in the hope of persuading right-leaning waverers to come home to Labour, the government’s been making it harder for legit people to head our way for work.
But that seems to have failed on two fronts.
Quite apart from the fact that it didn’t save their bacon in the by-election it’s also got experts warning of ‘an impending car crash’ in hospitals and care homes.
Basically, the supply of folk coming in to look after the sick and the elderly has practically dried up. Adding to broader shortages in the skilled workforce needed to prop up our ageing population.
Time for a rethink then on policy? More to the point, it’s the politics that’s got party strategists scratching their heads.
The Greens’ first ever by-election victor Hannah Spencer (no relation) may well have a few thoughts about the crumbling Palace of Westminster, given her professional background as a plumber and plasterer.
But there’ll be no plastering over cracks in Labour’s left-leaning voter base. And that’s the other big takeaway from Starmer’s near catastrophe last week.
Cue masses of agonised debate in Downing Street over the coming days. The brave face they’ll try and put on it will be more or less invisible behind the mountains of media chatter about where they’re headed next.
The nearest thing we might get to a clue could come as soon as Tuesday, when the Chancellor delivers her spring mini-budget.
She says there really won’t be much to it, but maybe she’s already having second thoughts about that. Because she’ll also be coming up with a new formula for student debt, it’ll be fascinating to see who’re the winners and losers.
Same as anything to do with the tax system the details are brain-numbingly hard to follow. But the bottom line will hover round whether it’ll be the posher or the humbler youngsters who come out on top.
Certainly safe to say that a great many more punters will be more intensely interested in that, frankly, than who’s in or who’s out of Number Ten.
The two topics are nonetheless subtly but inextricably linked. Simply because if Labour is opting to lean left this’ll be their first chance to let us in on the secret.
It’s all a bit small beer, mind, next to a couple of real biggies floating around just now. The first being the crisis gripping the royals by the throat.
No getting round it, the images plastered everywhere of the king’s own brother slumped in the back of his car after being collared by the cops will live on in everyone’s memory. Long after this government, or the next, or the one after that.
Its seedy background, the allegation that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor had snuggled up too close to the late unlamented Jeffrey Epstein, could seriously damage the credibility of the entire royal family.
Then again, Keir Starmer’s decision to make Peter Mandelson Our Man In Washington in spite of his ties to the same despicable paedophile, also punctures the public’s trust in the political class.
Given that everyone knew about those links, it’s not just the PM’s judgement that you wonder about, but his apparent ability to spot everything except the obvious.
Arguably the same could be said of not what he is but what he isn’t doing about another potentially monumental issue.
The Assisted Dying Bill is looking increasingly like it’s dead on its feet, excuse language. Because of a group of unelected peers defying the will of a majority of MPs and doing their utmost to bung it down the parliamentary pan.
Of course it’s horribly contentious, but then so were other epoch-defining measures like the abolition of capital punishment, and legalisation of abortion and male homosexuality.
Like this one, they were serious bits of legacy for political leaders of the day. And Starmer’s critics will say his failure to at least give the bill a fighting chance proves his lack of ‘the vision thing’ is beyond the reach of Specsavers.
Still, there are others around who do well not to believe the evidence of their own eyes. Like twenty-nine-year-old Sophie Downing, who got more than she bargained for a few days back when she dropped into her local coffee shop in Nottingham.
Perfectly happy that the staff had made her the matcha latte that she’d ordered, she was astonished to learn they’d also made her the richest woman in the world.
This is straight up, honest. The receipt for the tenner’s worth of gift card she’d used informed her that her balance now stood at just over sixty-three quadrillion pounds.
That, by the way, is a seventeen-figure total, more than two-thousand times as much as the entire American population can get its hands on in a whole year.
A spokesman for the company later admitted there’d been what it termed a ‘technical administrative error’.
As a result, it added: ‘The customer was generated a receipt which suggested they had a rather higher amount of money left on their gift card than they actually did.’ Nice bit of understatement there.
Anyway, Sophie found it hilarious. So did did the folk working at the place, as they gave her the bit of paper as a souvenir.
And, to cap it all, when she finally learned how much she was actually owed, it was enough for another coffee. Everybody happy then.
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.