PRESIDENT Donald Trump and the bond market. That is what it all comes down to.

In all the briefings, counter-briefings and counter-counter briefings in Westminster this week after Downing Street decided it had too many usable feet and decided to shoot at least one, that was the most memorable line.

It was in response to the question as to why Keir Starmer, with Labour’s polling at an historic nadir, his own popularity below subterranean and on the cusp of a manifesto-busting Budget, should stay in office.

And that was the answer — if he went, the international money markets and Trump would be upset.

Not the working people of Britain, who would largely welcome the end of his inglorious premiership. Not even the Labour Party, its MPs panicking for their future employment.

No. It is the institutions of class power, the City of London and the Washington alliance, who Starmer has served so loyally, who would miss him the most.

And if it does come to that, the bankers and the Trumpians can take out their anger on Morgan McSweeney, the Downing Street chief of staff who thought it would be a good idea to publicly display the fact that Starmer was in a fight to stay in post.

That was a rookie error that conceded people wanted him out — a truth that no skilled operator would ever have acknowledged.

So the first matter arising from the debacle is the survival of McSweeney in post. It is hard to overstate Starmer’s dependency on his chief of staff.

Still an inexperienced politician when he ran for Labour leader in 2020 — reportedly asking aides “am I really ready for this?” — McSweeney took him in hand and directed the leader ever since.

Starmer approached the job as an administrator who believed the status quo could be managed better — and he was the man to do it — but not substantively changed.

The politics was left to McSweeney, who is a right-wing factionalist pretending to run the country. But without him, the Prime Minister would hardly know which way to turn.

So losing him is not something Starmer will willingly contemplate.  However, the chief of staff’s list of blunders has grown, and his enemies waxed more numerous too.

He it was who thought Peter Mandelson in Washington was a good idea and fought too long to keep his mentor in post even after it became untenable.

His fingerprints were all over Starmer’s racist “island of strangers” speech, an address so awful that the Prime Minister had to disown it not long after, under pressure from almost everyone he knows socially.

So the misfired briefings this week ought to meet the “three strikes and you’re out” rule. McSweeney is, however, mounting a defence.
It goes like this: Yes, he authorised the briefings saying that Starmer would fight to the end against any challenge to his position. But he did not green-light attacks on particular Cabinet members.

The latter would be a sackable offence, the former was merely stupid.

Of course, this defence asks one to believe that when a Downing Street luminary contacted a lobby journalist to advise that the Prime Minister would “fight, fight and fight again” to stay in office the reporter did not then ask “against who?” or, if they did, the shadowy briefer just replied : “you know, anyone/everyone/no-one.”

It is hardly plausible that the same briefing did not also drift in the direction of mentioning Wes Streeting, Ed Miliband, maybe Shabana Mahmood.

But since Starmer wants to believe McSweeney, he may swallow any old nonsense served up as an excuse that would allow him to do so.

Whether he stays or goes, it is not only Starmer that he has damaged by his antics. The whole McSweeney political strategy, of appeasing the hard right in society and attacking the left in the party at every turn, has already hit the buffers.

Caerphilly was its epitaph. It has finally dawned on the dimmest Labour MPs — a competitive category to be sure — that they can no longer take socialist and progressive voters for granted and that McSweeney’s Farage-lite politics are the road to political perdition.

Painfully, Starmer has tried to recalibrate, from his Labour conference speech on. But to call the premier a “one-trick pony” would be generous, and he certainly ain’t got a second act in him.

So the challenge from within a despairing party is a matter of “when” not “if.” There are two schools of thought.

One is, why wait for the looming calamity in next May’s devolved and local elections? Change course now, straight after the Budget, rather than remain immobilised for months and then lose half your elected representatives.

The other is — May’s disaster is unavoidable. Let Starmer own it.  Who wants to take over the helm when the iceberg is going to be hit anyway? Let a new leader step in to pick up the pieces.

If the “when” is therefore uncertain, all the more so is the “who.”

From the Cabinet left, often termed “soft left,” the front-runner would obviously have been deputy prime minister Angie Rayner before her unanticipated exit from government pursued by the HMRC over a sum she may or may not have failed to pay in stamp duty.

Rayner, for all her history of compromises with Starmer and the right, retains a powerful resonance on the Labour left. Her undoubted failure to resist Labour support for the Gaza genocide leaves her condemned, but it has not completely overshadowed her pro-union history, nor her popular touch.

There can be little doubt that she would be the successor to Starmer most likely to make an immediate impact in the polls, and be able to take on Nigel Farage. Like the Reform leader, she trades on an authenticity which in her case is not entirely fraudulent.

However, an early leadership contest may come too soon for her after the bruising experience of losing her job amid public obloquy.  

She has re-emerged in the Commons, speaking up for workers’ rights, but is not necessarily yet in a place where she is ready to take over as prime minister.

A leadership election next May might well be a different matter, if Starmer hangs on that long. In an earlier clash, representing the “soft left” might fall to former leader Ed Miliband, now energy secretary.

Miliband denied this week any intention to stand, but he would, woudn’t he? A serving Cabinet minister can hardly do otherwise.

Many Labour MPs tell a different story about his intentions, and Miliband would hardly be human if he did not seek some form of a do-over, a vindication, after his first crack at leadership ended so badly in 2015.

He is an intelligent man, one of the most competent ministers in the Cabinet and his passionate party conference speech was the best this year, taking on Elon Musk and Reform with a conviction others, including Starmer, could not match.

But it is not at all clear what electoral problem Labour faces to which Ed Miliband is the answer. He still exudes north London geekishness, not “red wall” plain-speaking, and would not have Farage breaking out in a sweat.

Beyond that, the “soft left” cupboard is almost bare. Andy Burnham is unavailable and his conference intervention has been judged a mistake. Like Rayner, he has no campaign infrastructure in place.  

Lucy Powell, like every deputy leader of anything in history, would doubtless love to lose the first word in her title, but she does not appear a plausible prime minister.

The genuine left can field a candidate, but only for purposes of political argument. Such a standard-bearer could never secure the 80 nominations needed to make the membership ballot.

Every measure Starmer and McSweeney have taken since winning Labour’s leadership in 2020 has been designed to prevent the election of a Jeremy Corbyn ever again. And it has worked, for now at least.

For the right, Streeting must be front runner. His ambitions are no secret. His forced disavowal of them this week were couched in the same terms — “in cannot foresee the circumstances” — as were regularly deployed by Michael Heseltine in relation to standing against Margaret Thatcher back in the 1980s.

Those circumstances did, in fact, emerge from the mist in 1990.  No doubt Streeting’s will too. The Health Secretary has already been trying to tiptoe to the left, reaching out to left MPs, nuancing on Gaza and the rest of it.

It is not sincere. It is not meaningful. But he is pitching for the credulous in a party electorate bamboozled by Keir Starmer, so why not?

Rachel Reeves’s hopes are not so much dead in the water as no longer afloat. It is rumoured that McSweeney’s own favours are tending towards Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.

No shuffling leftwards there. Mahmood is happy leaning into the McSweeney plan of “see you and raise” to every racist and authoritarian idea coming from the Tories or Reform.

She also has an advantage over Streeting of being a woman in a party that is, or ought to be, embarrassed by having failed to elect one to the leadership in 120 years.

Yet all in all, there is little to quicken the pulse in this putative battle for a distinctly besmirched and bent-out-of-shape crown.

The damage done by Starmer and McSweeney may be undoable, at least for years to come.

Working people in Britain will pay the price for that. Trump and the bond market? They may shed a tear, but they will get along just fine.