IT is both remarkable and inevitable that Labour MPs should now be calling for Keir Starmer to quit as prime minister, either immediately or after next May’s local and devolved elections.

It is remarkable because it is only a little over a year since Starmer won an immense Commons majority, albeit on a historically low share of the vote. Normally, a premier in that position could be looking at two full terms in Downing Street — 10 years — at least.

Never has an election victory been squandered so fast. That makes the calls for a change at the top unsurprising.

Labour’s polling is down at around 20 per cent of the electorate, well behind the far-right Reform. This year’s local elections were uniformly disastrous across all parts of the country which went to the polls.

Few Labour MPs now believe they hold safe seats any longer, and that is even before the impact of the new Corbyn-Sultana party of the left has been factored in.

Starmer was therefore struggling, with back-bench rebellions and a tough Budget to be drawn up within bond market rules, even before the last calamitous week.

He lost his deputy to a house purchase scandal, and his US ambassador to his links with a paedophile financier. This week, the Downing Street strategy director, Paul Ovenden, has followed Angela Rayner and Peter Mandelson out the door, because of revolting messages he shared.

This was exposed in Paul Holden’s forthcoming book The Fraud, which threatens to do further damage to the sordid Starmer apparatus upon its imminent publication.

Worst of all, the Labour leader has been passive and largely mute in the face of the surging far-right menace. When progressives are waiting for a clarion call to resist racism and neofascism, they have been met by waffle from Downing Street instead.

So it is scant surprise that the skids are under this most hapless of politicians. And if Starmer thinks that spending two days ingratiating himself further with President Donald Trump will turn British public opinion his way, that is yet another misjudgement on his account.

In this context, the contest for Labour deputy leadership takes on more interest. Starmer’s rigged rules worked as intended and excluded the only candidate posing a serious challenge to the status quo, Bell Ribeiro-Addy.

There is, nevertheless, a choice of sorts. Lucy Powell, Commons leader until sacked in the post-Rayner reshuffle to the right, is the candidate backed by many of Starmer’s internal critics against Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson.

There is no basis for assuming that she offers a genuine alternative. She can hardly pose as a principled critic of a government of which she was, until two weeks ago, an uncomplaining member.

However, her return to a position of authority courtesy of the Labour membership so soon after being dismissed would be a serious rebuke to the Prime Minister.

Thus, she is backed by leader-in-waiting Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham and the new Mainstream organisation he has founded to rally Labour’s soft left.

But she needs to spell out where she stands on key issues without delay — the Gaza genocide first of all, the priorities for the Budget, the arms bill, public ownership of water, continuing to extend employment rights beyond the present legislation and more.

And what has Powell to say about the likes of Ovenden and McSweeney, about the promiscuous withdrawal of the parliamentary whip from Labour MPs and Starmer’s general authoritarianism?

These are questions trade unions and constituency parties should be asking in their meetings to decide whether or who to nominate. Answers cannot be delayed — the government is already in the last-chance saloon.