Smarkets have this market up on whether Sir Keir Starmer will face a leadership challenge before the next general election and I’m not sure what to make of this market.

The polls apart from YouGov and Kantar seem to imply we’re generally in hung parliament territory and YouGov has the quirk* of having the Greens a lot higher than other pollsters. Given the year we’ve had it must worry Labour that they’ve only led in six of them, with five of them in January so will Labour take drastic action?

There’s much talk about the king over the water Andy Burnham replacing Starmer before the general election but I don’t the logistics will work for Burnham and I suspect if it looks like happening then his past terrible record, especially when running for Labour leader in 2010 and 2015, will be brought up and stop him replacing Starmer.

Perhaps the real king over the water, Mark Drakeford who led Labour to their best ever result in the Senedd elections, might be a contender, but there’s not really anyone else that you think would definitely do better than Starmer? Even Corbyn’s ‘best’ result saw him finish 56 seats behind the Conservatives which by his own metric was a disastrous performance.

On that basis I’m backing no leadership challenge. The Labour Party will probably exercise some avizandum on deciding whether to ditch Starmer which should help him.

TSE

*It may well be a quirk or it might be the reality, it has echoes of the latter half of the 2010 parliament when far too many people thought most of the UKIP vote share would revert back to the Tory party by election day.