Ian Dale

He was very reflective and it seems to me, all the mood music is that Keir Starmer is going to set out a timetable for his departure.

He's not going to go, if he does resign, he's not going to go immediately because there isn't a ready successor.

So I suspect he will stay in office for several months while the Labour Party has a leadership election.

Well,

If you look at various changes of Prime Minister over the past 10 years, on one occasion there was a coronation where there wasn't a leadership election.

The Conservative Party just decided that they wouldn't have one.

And Rishi Sunak emerged as a successor to Liz Truss.

I don't think that's going to happen here.

The Labour Party normally take about three months to run a leadership election, which in government terms is a huge amount of time.

And the problem they've got is that the financial markets are already in a state of flux.

And our borrowing levels, the bond yields, are higher at the moment than they were when Liz Truss' mini-budget happened.

Now, if they get the impression that there's going to be political instability over the next few months, which inevitably there will be,

those bond markets are going to go crackers, which means that the cost of government borrowing goes up.

It means that the cost of borrowing for individuals with mortgages, that goes up.

Inflation goes up.

And any growth agenda is out of the window.

So this is a very, very difficult time.

Yes, I think that is partly what's going on, and it is very possible that Labour do that.

I mean, Labour is, in theory, a left-of-centre party, and two of the main candidates for the succession, Angela Rayner and

And Andy Burnham, although he's not an MP at the moment, so that's another fly in the ointment.