Labour Party is toast if Keir Starmer doesn't step down soon - Angela Rayner knows this

Keir Starmer is performing so atrociously, with poll ratings more abysmal with each passing week, that many are now asking the big one: how long can he last? And the guy hasn't even done eleven months yet.

Could we really be reaching the endgame already? Could someone with such a massive majority, faced with an official opposition almost dying before our eyes, really be in danger of being booted out before the next election? Incredibly, it's becoming possible. Incredibly, it seems Starmer might already have outlived his usefulness to his own party.

And there's no doubt he was useful, once. Very. Because although intensely ambitious, he has few if any political principles, and was therefore the perfect candidate, personally selected by party strategist and string-puller Morgan McSweeney, to run for the Labour leadership. McSweeney was horrified by Labour's extreme leftward lurch. He knew that, to win again, the party needed to move back towards the centre. That meant putting forward a candidate dishonest enough to promise nonsense about "continuity Corbyn" to the hard-left membership, win the leadership, then unceremoniously abandon everything he'd pledged with an abrupt shift rightwards.

Starmer played the role perfectly and without shame. Then, come the general election, he was aided by the electorate being sick of the Tories. Try as Sunak might to show how Starmer would be disastrous and that we could no more trust his promises than we could trust a half-starved labrador with a bag of Winalot, nobody wanted to know. They just wanted the Tories out. Hence Labour's loveless landslide.

But that's when Starmer's lack of principle and nous became fatal flaws. So, in just 11 months, we've had the freebies scandal, the winter fuel disaster, the betrayal of the WASPI women and farmers, one of the worst budgets ever, including manifesto-busting tax and borrowing hikes, pay rises for train drivers to bribe them not to strike, the Chagos capitulation, accusations that anyone concerned about illegal immigration must be "far-right", record Channel crossings, bizarre "island of strangers" garbage, and the start of a Brexit reversal.

The result? Nigel Farage is on course to be Prime Minister, and Labour MPs fear their party is in danger of going the same way as the Tories. Starmer has dismayed the Left, while fooling nobody on the Right. His desperate smear speech yesterday about how we can't "trust" Farage was, after all his own endless flip-flops, the most hypocritical I have witnessed from any leader in 40 years of following politics. Nobody's buying it, and his own party, McSweeney included, knows it.

It's not as easy for Labour to replace a leader as it is for the Tories, who go through theirs like shots at a stag do. But it would amaze me if Rayner, Streeting and others aren't now plotting their moment to strike, well before 2029.

Streeting gives Labour the best chance of success, but he sits on a tiny majority and is regarded by the members as too Blairite. They adore Rayner, however. She might protest that she has no ambition to be Prime Minister, but that's about as convincing as a vegan sausage at a barbecue. She'll surely go for it. Her contempt for Starmer is almost palpable.

She also has the qualities to revive Labour's fortunes. I'd rather pull my own teeth out than vote for her. But she can appeal to both parts of Labour's electoral coalition: big city wokerati and Red Wallers. Her union credentials are impeccable. She is authentic and even charismatic. If she's up against Farage in 2029, it'll be a mighty contest.

That's all a long way off. But surely Sir Flip-Flopalot won't be bothering the bookies by then. And if, by some miracle, he is, well, his party really will be toast.