Starmer drama - another week in the limelight
Will council elections spell the end for Sir Keir?
It was supposed to be the week in which Sir Keir toughed out the creaking pressure on his administration. That was then but this is now.
The PM did just about enough last week to see off his critics but his attempts to circle the wagons for a second time in the was less so and the unwillingness of backbenchers to roar their approval was noticeable in the Commons.
MPs on the Commons select committee did their best to elicit information from Olly Robbins but were unable to get him to fully corroborate their suspicions that it was some kind of grand conspiracy.
So the probing achieved some things but not all and so the outcome is still up in the air.
The select committee was a bit like a political version of the TV quiz ‘Only Connect’ with MPs confounded by obtuse questions.
In among the swamp lay different types of political effluent which coalesced around whether MPs had been deliberately just misled, wilfully misled, misled accidentally or misled by misleading statements. Or even weren’t misled at all and it was all a dreadful catalogue of mistakes and misunderstandings.
No-one had the smoking gun that would settle the matter. Committee chairman Emily Thornberry - a Labour MP - was determined to generate some kind of fury before the committee locked up for they day.
So the scraps he threw MPs trying to get to the bottom of the lake were tonal - mood music of the sort you get when hanging around waiting for someone to decide whether your call really is important to them.
The select committee ‘B’ movie gave way to the Commons where MPs lined up to vent their frustrations - in public, for once - about the difficulties they were having getting information into the public domain.
Both the debate in Parliament - checking in at about three hours and the select committee hearing were not quite as explosive as trailed.
Sir Keir brought his own brand of explanation with him that mixed a partial admission of guilt on the one hand and a steadfast refusal to entertain the idea that he might just have been partially in the wrong at the other.
As Churchill once said of Russia, he was a “riddle wrapped up in mystery, inside an enigma.”
So this week, Labour will be busy arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.
That’s politics for you.