Starmer resigned this morning. The most telling thing was how little the markets moved.

This morning, after Keir Starmer announced he will resign, the striking thing about the market''s response was how little there was of it. The pound slipped about 0.2 per cent against the dollar, to around $1.32. Ten-year gilt yields — the government''s long-term borrowing cost — were roughly flat, near 4.85 per cent, after jumping on Friday when Andy Burnham''s by-election win first put the leadership in play (CNBC, this morning).

That calm is the story. Markets had long priced a Starmer exit; Burnham has been the runaway favourite for weeks. And the manner of it was orderly — he is staying on as caretaker, with a managed handover and a clear timetable, nominations between 9 and 16 July. A confirmed but fully expected event, handled tidily, releases very little of the risk premium that uncertainty builds up. The thing markets fear is the surprise. This morning there wasn''t one.

It helps that the bar had been set in fear. UK long-term borrowing costs are among the G7''s highest, and May''s public-sector borrowing came in at £23.3bn — the worst for any May in six years (ONS, 19 June). But the read is not panic: one chief economist, at Peel Hunt, argued this morning that for all its high debt, Britain is not a "fiscal outlier" next to its G7 peers. The premium is real; the alarm is not.

Where this still reaches your household is the pound. Sterling has been grinding lower through the political turmoil of recent weeks, and a weaker pound makes everything Britain buys from abroad dearer — the dollars you change for an August holiday, the fuel and food priced in dollars on the way in. Today''s move was small; it is the direction over the month, not the morning, that shows up at the bureau de change and on the supermarket shelf. This is information about a mechanism, not advice.

And here is what markets will actually watch from here. It is not, in the end, who becomes Prime Minister — it is who becomes Chancellor: the person who will write the borrowing plans the bond market has to read. That is the contest within the contest, and it runs until a new leader is chosen, by 1 September at the latest.

A government''s borrowing cost and its currency are two prices the world puts on the same thing — its story about the future. This morning Britain changed the storyteller without, yet, changing the story. The markets, sensibly, are waiting to read the next chapter before they reprice the book.