Nominations opened this morning. It can all be over by six o'clock on 15 July

Nominations for the Labour leadership opened this morning. To stand, you need 81 Labour MPs to put their names to yours. There are 402 of them. That is a fifth of the parliamentary party, and you have six days to get there. Nominations from MPs close at six o'clock on the evening of Wednesday 15 July.

Andy Burnham is the only declared candidate. He is not close to 81. He is somewhere past 200, judging by the photograph taken in Westminster on 22 June, the day Sir Keir Starmer resigned.

Wes Streeting, who spent months being described as the challenger, endorsed Burnham that same afternoon. Al Carns, the former armed forces minister and the last name anyone was still floating, ruled himself out last night. Months of internal Labour politics, he said, is not what the country needs.

Here is what happens next. The dates matter more than the personalities.

Monday 13 July: a hustings, for Labour MPs only. Wednesday 15 July, six o'clock in the evening: nominations from MPs close. From then until six o'clock on Thursday 16 July: the trade unions and the affiliated societies make their nominations. Friday 17 July: if one candidate has been validly nominated, a special conference confirms him as leader.

Had there been two, none of that would have happened. Constituency parties would have nominated through to 31 July. Members and affiliated supporters would have voted from 6 August to 27 August. The result would have come on 29 August, before Parliament returned on 1 September. Seven weeks of public argument, and a man who wanted to be Prime Minister standing on stages in Birmingham and Glasgow and Newcastle, answering whatever was put to him.

That is what a coronation skips. Not a rival. A calendar.

I want to be careful about the shape of this, because it would be easy to write that contests are good and coronations are bad, and I do not think the evidence carries it. Labour held a full contest in 2020. Hustings, ballots, four months. Not one of those months produced a serious public exchange about what happens to work when the machines can do it. The question was as absent from a long contest as it is from a short one.

So the charge is not that anybody is being cheated. The rules are Labour's own. Its 2021 conference raised the nomination threshold from 10 per cent of MPs to 20 per cent, which is why the number is 81 and why the field can never exceed five. They are working as designed.

The charge is against everybody, and it is about competence.

Britain is about to install a Prime Minister without anyone in public life having made him say what he thinks will happen to the country's work. The Conservatives have not asked. Reform has not asked. The Liberal Democrats have not asked. Nor has the party choosing him.

On 7 July the Office for Budget Responsibility published projections running to 2075. Every one of them assumes the British public keeps working and keeps paying tax. That assumption carries more weight than any policy in any manifesto. Nobody has to defend it. Nobody is going to be asked to.

Six days from this morning, at six o'clock, the window closes. After that, the arguing happens somewhere else, or it does not happen.