There are moments in politics where the situation has spun so badly out of control that somebody has to step in quickly to end the chaos.
Most famously in recent history it was former 1922 committee chairman Sir Graham Brady’s visit to Liz Truss in Downing Street to force her to resign after the mini-budget fallout.
But last night Keir Starmer had reached such a moment. His government was in meltdown.
A brutal 48 hours had seen him apparently lose control of his government’s policy agenda after the welfare reform rebellion by Labour backbenchers.
This had been followed by him failing to guarantee his chancellor’s future in PMQs as she sat behind him in tears.
The optics of the drama at PMQs fed into the picture of a government that was rapidly going into a tailspin.
With a £5bn black hole in the country’s finances left by the welfare retreat, fevered speculation over a reshuffle, and no real sign of a plan to sort things out.
But the real problem was that the gilt markets – the same issue that ended the Truss government – had taken notice of what was happening and not happening and reacted accordingly.
The black hole in the finances, the lack of a vote of confidence in the chancellor and Rachel Reeves’ apparently distraught personal state were all enough for the UK’s credit rating to come under threat.
A spokesperson from Downing Street trying to tell journalists that the prime minister had confidence in the chancellor after the fact was simply not enough. This was doubly true when various bits of spin about it being a personal matter or a row with the Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle were offered as explanation for the tears.
As the front pages began to drop with pictures of Reeves and questions over whether Sir Keir backed her on them, the prime minister had to reassert his authority and personally give his chancellor his support.
Without that, his big speech on NHS reform today would have been a sidenote to a story about a government that was in a state of collapse.
It was always planned for him to do interviews to mark his first year in office, but the one with BBC’s podcast Political Thinking with Nick Robinson gave an early opportunity to help fix the self-inflicted damage and restore order.
He has now effusively given Reeves his backing, which will not please many Labour MPs and now may make it difficult to remove her if he was so minded. However, he has at least restored some semblance of order given himself some breathing space to work out how he is going to wrestle back the political agenda from his fractious backbench MPs.
