The latest season of our favourite celebrity back-stabbing show seems to come around faster and faster these days doesn’t it? But yes, this week sees a brand new edition of I’m a Prime Minister… Get Me Out of Here. The clever money is on Keir Starmer to be first out of course, but then he is the TV villain we love to hate. The trickier guess is who might actually win.
As ever those “celebrity” names ready to put their head in the lion’s jaws include two or three you know immediately then a lot more you have to Google to remind yourself why their hats are even in the ring in the first place. So yes we have front-runner Wes Streeting at 4/1, Andy Burnham (9/1), Shabana Mahmood (10/1), Yvette Cooper (12/1) and Angela Rayner also at nines.
But Lucy Powell (25/1), Chris Bryant (33/1), Lee Pitcher (25/1), and Darren Jones (25/1) take a bit more head-scratching.
Oh and good Lord even Ed Miliband is 25/1… can you even imagine!?
But let’s have a look at lovely, lovable, cuddly Wes shall we?
Odd fish isn’t he? Sometimes he can look like a lone sane voice in an increasingly demented Government, and sometimes he looks like he’s in the middle of the longest ever audition for Strictly Come Dancing.
Which, let’s be honest, however this plays out is the only absolute cast iron certainty here.
(Interestingly the shortest odds you can get for Britain’s next PM is 5/2… any guesses? Yes, step forward one Nigel Paul Farage. But that’s another election for another day.)
Anyway, Streeting spent the whole of breakfast time putting on his best smiling assassin face and telling incredulous interviewers how he would never ever stab the PM in the back, pinky swear.
Asked whether he would rule out standing against Sir Keir in the future, instead of using the word “yes” like you or me, he told BBC Breakfast: “I cannot see circumstances in which I would do that to our Prime Minister.”
Really? The rest of us can, Wes.
Wes comes over part-MP, part-Michael Mcintyre, with an easy patter designed to distract.
But his mates on the backbenches are wont to describe him as “ruthless” and “fabulously ambitious”.
And, let’s be clear, what he is really doing is engineering a set of circumstances where he gets plausible deniability – where Wes is almost forced to step up to the plate kicking and screaming because, well, someone has to save Sir Keir from himself.
As one surprisingly insightful Labour backbencher said: “They’ve managed to create a situation where Wes is the victim and the adult in the room.”
Another added following this morning’s media round the Health Secretary’s position was “so much stronger”.
Literally the more he protested he didn’t want the job the more likely it was that he would get the job.
And yet there are still 7.4million people on this Health Secretary’s NHS waiting lists and we were told yesterday only two health authorities were hitting cancer treatment targets. Oh and dissatisfaction with the NHS is at an all time high.
And the junior doctors who just got a mind-meltingly huge payrise have just ordered fresh strikes for, er, a payrise.
All going swimmingly then.
But yes, Starmer is in very deep trouble (which means Britain is in very deep trouble) and the forthcoming budget hanging over our heads like a sword of Damocles is going to make things much much worse.
Thing is, this edition of I’m a Prime Minister… Get Me Out of Here might be a whole lot of fun, if the chaos and uncertainty at the very top of our political pile didn’t spook the markets and deter investment.
The more this wretched Labour Party infights the more people like you and me pay for their vanity and incompetence.
Still, you could distract yourself by taking a look at a new website called ‘Wes for Leader’, which was registered a few hours ago.
Wes who is definitely, absolutely and in no-way challenging for Leader of course.