So who will be forced out of Starmer’s cabinet first?

Just two weeks after the general election, the whispers in Westminster about which underperforming minister will fail fastest are already rife. John Rentoul reveals where you should place your bets…

On current form, home secretary Yvette Cooper looks set to struggle to meet Labour’s commitment to ‘stop the boats’ and ‘smash the gangs’ (EPA)

Which Labour cabinet minister will be the first to hit trouble? Politics is a cruel trade, so it should come as no surprise that this question is already being discussed in Westminster.

Two of the candidates made statements in the Commons today: Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, announced the emergency early release of offenders to make space in prisons; and Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, repeated all the things in the Labour manifesto and King’s Speech about green energy.

Mahmood got through her first test with ease, because it is so obviously not her fault that the prisons are full, and she is doing the only thing possible, having inherited a “dangerous” situation from the Conservative government.

Miliband suffered an uncharacteristic stumble, being told off by Lindsay Hoyle, the speaker, for failing to provide an advance copy of his statement in time to the speaker’s office and to the opposition. As a former cabinet minister, he should have got that right.

However, his position is secure enough. He won’t deliver decarbonised electricity by 2030, but that is still six years away and anyway people like the idea of clean energy.

The Tory press would love the first casualty to be Angela Rayner. The Daily Mail addressed its front page to her on Thursday, asking: “How will these new burdens on firms help growth?” But Rayner is a tough and pragmatic politician. Her employment rights policies will be made employer-friendly by the time they become law, and anyway they will be implemented by Jonathan Reynolds’s business department.

Rayner’s responsibility for house-building is like Miliband’s green energy – she won’t succeed, but it is on a several-year timescale and everyone will give her credit for trying.

Then there is David Lammy, the foreign secretary, who might say something undiplomatic, although he was able to extricate himself from past comments about Donald Trump by pointing out that Trump’s own choice as his vice-presidential running mate had said worse. Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, might have to deal with bankrupt universities imminently; Steve Reed, environment secretary, might have to rescue Thames Water, which will not be cheap; Louise Haigh, the transport secretary, might find that the trains still don’t run on time.

But the cabinet minister looking most vulnerable, I think, is Yvette Cooper, the home secretary. She is the one facing an immediate problem that cannot either be solved or blamed on the Tories. Labour has not promised to “stop the boats”, but its promise to “smash the gangs” is equally undeliverable.

A new government will be granted some leeway by public opinion, but unless it can get a grip on the problem of the small boats it will find that Nigel Farage doesn’t take votes only from the Tory party.

Hence the attempts by the prime minister’s spokespeople to hose down speculation that Thursday’s European summit in Blenheim Palace would see the first steps towards a deal between the UK and the EU that could start to reduce the problem. The speculation was most specific in The Times: that EU leaders expected Keir Starmer to ask for a deal on “returns” – that is, if the UK took its share of Europe-wide asylum seekers, the EU would agree that the UK could send people arriving in small boats back to France.

This is not going to happen. It is the deal that Rishi Sunak tried to strike with Emmanuel Macron last year. Sunak thought that Macron had said “oui” – but it turned out that he meant “non”.

Starmer’s conversation at dinner with Macron in Oxfordshire on Thursday night is likely to be similar. It is not in Macron’s interest to agree to anything that looks to his own voters like France accepting the UK’s rejects – or even, more bluntly, anything that looks like helping the UK in any way. It doesn’t matter that it would be in France’s interest to stop the Channel crossings, too, because the tent shanty towns around Calais would disappear. The French government is not going to agree to accept returns, whether it is part of a wider EU-UK agreement or not.

Macron said when he arrived at Blenheim, “There is no silver bullet” when asked if he will agree a migration deal with Starmer. He said: “We do know the situation; we do our best; we did improve the situation during the past few years; and we will follow up.” In other words, “Non.”

In which case, Cooper is left as powerless as the string of ineffective Tory home secretaries who preceded her – without even the figleaf of pretending that repudiating the European Court of Human Rights is an option.

She must hope that the issue is so important that the prime minister takes the brunt of responsibility for it. Or, which is more likely, that something comes completely out of the blue and one of her colleagues finds themselves, unexpectedly, in even more trouble.