Will He Won't He?

(Read on, or view here: https://youtu.be/Qe2EZ5oKrlU)

The mood music is cacophonous. With Labour facing disaster at the polls in under a fortnight and the scandal over Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador refusing to go away, the Prime Minister’s running out of friends. A move to chuck him out would be a bloody affair though. But, as our Political Correspondent Peter Spencer reports, there is one other remote but not implausible possibility.

Sir Keir Starmer’s thought about it before, and he wouldn’t be human if the idea didn’t sometimes sneak into his head again now.

In lots of ways he seems to have the savvy of a puppy with no concept of road safety, but he’s not an idiot. He can’t have failed to notice the, shall we say, nuanced public support he’s getting from cabinet colleagues.

Nor can he have not spotted the mood of sheer despondency permeating the Labour party at large. Or for that matter its tanked polling status and his personal rock-bottom approval rating.

Tie all that in with the near-certainty of his side losing thousands of council seats on May the seventh as well as humiliation in the Scottish and Welsh assemblies, and the unthinkable just might nudge into view.

It’s worth remembering Starmer’s telling admission of a couple of years ago on the back of damaging hits in a swathe of town halls, and a lost by-election in a town that the party really should have hung onto.

Here’s what he said when asked if he considered quitting at the time: ‘I did. Because I didn’t feel that I should be bigger than the party. And that if I couldn’t bring about the change, perhaps there should be a change.’

In the event he was talked out of it, and of course went on to lead Labour into a landslide victory.

But as a week in politics used to be a long time and now about ten minutes does it, reverses these days can be as sudden as they are dramatic.

And while chatter over the likelihood of a leadership challenge has ebbed and flowed for months, the fact is that when it comes to tidy regicide Labour isn’t a patch on the Tories.

Upshot being we’d be looking at a protracted period of brutal internecine warfare that can hardly be expected to play well with the audience.

Which is why a nice tidy handover of the reins would at least give this government a sporting chance at getting back some of its credibility with the voting public.

The Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham has the definite plus that he doesn’t look and sound like Mr Potato Head, which probably does much to explain why he’s the party’s most popular figure.

Ok, the fact that he isn’t an MP at present rules him out of the race, but a nice peerage and the offer of a fancy job somewhere or other could doubtless persuade someone to step down and get him an in.

There’s also been much talk of him then standing on joint ticket with former Deputy PM Angela Rayner, who commands plenty of support too.

Yes, she had to resign after getting in a spot of bother over her tax affairs. But that’s likely to get sorted soon. Leaving the way forward maybe, just maybe, for a lovely spangly new-look government.

For sure all this is no more than a punt. But with a little bit of squinting it could yet turn out to be a runner.

On the coin’s flipside, mind, you can’t help but wonder who on earth would be crazy enough to even want the job of Prime Minister just now.

Face it, speculation’s mounting by the day that the so-called leader of the free world is losing his marbles. And the irrefutable reality is that his bungling Middle-East jolly is burning a hole in British pockets.

Not just us, obviously, but it’s rising prices at the pumps and in the shops, plus likely hikes in interest rates, that whoever’s got the keys to Number Ten is up against.

Infuriatingly, all this comes just as the economy was looking set to start behaving itself at long last.

Inflation seemed ready to take a tidy little tumble before the fighting broke out, but now could well soon outstrip wage rises, according to official number-crunchers the Office for National Statistics.

On top of that, economic forecast group the EY Item Club is gloomily predicting that the war’s going to lead to the nastiest hit since the Covid pandemic.

To cap it all, a couple of top accounting firms reckon it’s got us edging towards a recession that could cost a quarter of a million Brits their jobs.

All this on the say-so of a man who’s even been driving his own staff off their rockers lately.

Donald Trump’s endless stream of self-contradictions and straightforward errors in fact have left his staff stuck with an ongoing cleanup operation.

This according to the Washington Post newspaper, which is getting more daring by the day about the man’s odd, to put it mildly, behaviour.

To which the White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly grumpily retorts ‘the bloodthirsty media’ is getting through to him and then: ‘Complaining about the answers they get.’

She adds that he’s: ‘The most transparent President in history.’ Has to be said, reading many of his late-night social media splurges, that invisibility might be the better option. Or a padded cell.

Certainly that’s the implication of the Washington Post article, which cheekily contains among the ads interspersed in the piece one designed to help people spot signs of dementia.

And then there are the readers’ responses below, topped by an automatically generated conversation summary.

This reads: ‘The comments express significant concern about President Donald Trump’s mental health, with many suggesting he is suffering from dementia and is unfit for office.’

You could say that, judging by these little nuggets: ‘His staff serves as nurses struggling to keep him alive and appearing functional.’ And: ‘Trump dementia is a hundred times worse than the previous guy.’

Oh dear, oh dear oh dear. Time to give another chap a chance? Maybe even another species?

Admittedly we haven’t shared a common ancestor with sperm whales for more than ninety million years, but we talk a remarkably similar language.

That’s according to Project Ceti, short for Cetacean Translation Initiative, which is running an ongoing study of their behaviour.

Last month they released a video of one of them giving birth while others supported her. Sweet in itself, but what they’ve since spotted that they actually talk to one another much like we do.

It seems the little clicks they make follow similar patterns to those you find in languages like Mandarin, Latin and Slovenian.

And, also rather sweet, they put their heads together when they’re gossiping.

After all, as the project’s founder David Gruber put it: ‘If you wanted to talk to someone about a Chaucer novel or something – you wouldn’t want to do that from opposite ends of a football stadium.’

Makes sense. But the relatable bits don’t end there. They have grandmas and even babysit each other’s calves.

All in all they’re as kind and sensible as the best of us – and a lot more so than some.