This is going to be an ugly weekend for British politics. How ugly we won’t quite know until Saturday night, when enough votes will have been counted to judge whether Keir Starmer’s government has suffered merely a midterm kicking or a full-blown collapse, and what dark forces may have been unleashed in the process. For you needn’t be a Labour voter to worry about the implications of local elections in which so many candidates were caught expressing views so extreme they chill the blood.

It’s fear of what this means for Britain in the long term that explains, in part, why the prime minister’s enemies were gathering long before the polling stations closed.

Angela Rayner is expected to make “an intervention” this weekend. Wes Streeting – the preferred pick of many ministers, if not party members – is said to have an entire shadow operation ready to go. Next week, the soft-left Mainstream grouping will publish what looks uncannily like the beginnings of a manifesto for Andy Burnham, via a report on “Manchesterism” and how the mayor’s economic experiment could be translated nationally. Though Starmer is visibly digging in, the idea of him leading the party into another general election seems vanishingly unlikely, meaning there will inevitably be calls this weekend just to get the inevitable over with.

Yet to trigger a leadership contest right now would be a mistake, and not just because some of Labour’s potential players aren’t even on the pitch yet. (You don’t have to be a paid-up Burnham fan to think he should be given time to try to get back into parliament, if only because otherwise he will for ever be Labour’s martyred king over the water. While a swift and uncontested coronation may look appealingly........

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