If not Keir Starmer, then who? That’s altogether the wrong question. What matters is not who but what comes next. A black cloud of near terminal despair has fallen upon Labour MPs, but seeking a saviour is a useless endeavour until they decide what it is they want to do.

The party is facing a cataclysm in next week’s local elections. MPs will watch their councillors, the backbone of their local parties, vanish. Can they avoid panic? In their slough of despond they need to stop and think. Look at it this way: they have three full years ahead with a vast working majority of 165. They have the power to do everything the country most needs. Sunk so low in the polls, they have nothing to lose and nothing to fear (but fear itself). This chance may never come their way again, and they will regret it for ever if they throw it away, vainly chasing lost popularity through overcaution, trying to appease everyone while pleasing no one. By starting again unconstrained they can regain some lost respect.

The country is in deep decline, the cost of living crisis worsening. The prime minister’s chief secretary, Darren Jones, warns that rises in energy, fuel, food and flight prices “as a consequence of what Donald Trump has done in the Middle East” will last long after whenever the war ends, and the International Monetary Fund says the war will hit Britain hardest of the G20 countries. The UK’s inflation rate tops the G7 chart. Socially we fall behind, losing two years of healthy life expectancy over the past decade, as gross inequality catches up with us.

This is a national emergency to be treated as wartime, not keep calm and carry on time. The government needs to break from obsolete economic pledges made in an era before Donald Trump’s tariffs, tantrums, economy-wrecking war and threats to Greenland and the Falklands, and before Europe felt unprotected on every flank. A new leader needs the........

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