Chris Mason: Smiles of a survivor as Starmer attempts his latest reset

The prime minister wore the smiles of a survivor and his team wore expressions of relief.

The Panshanger Community Centre in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, was bedecked with Union flag bunting and plastic chairs.

I was there as it was my turn to conduct what is known as a pool interview on behalf of all of the broadcasters.

At the start of the year, Sir Keir Starmer had hoped trips like this would be a regular focus.

On the first day back in January he invited us reporters to a similar community centre in Reading. But loads of the questions were about Venezuela and Greenland.

A later planned trip was postponed and a news conference held in Downing Street instead, such were the dominance and volume of international news.

Sir Keir has long been keen to talk about the cost of living, but the opportunity cost of chaos, both international and then domestic, has made that a whole lot harder. The space to be heard gets squeezed.

A cabinet minister expressed this frustration to me the other day: they felt there was evidence slowly emerging of things picking up economically, but not the capacity to talk about it.

Maybe, just maybe, they may get a chance now.

The magnitude of Monday, the genuine peril the prime minister faced, meant that many including some officials in Downing Street thought for at least a while that Sir Keir might have to announce his resignation before the day was out – as our chief political correspondent, Henry Zeffman, reports here.

But the scale and imminence of the threat prompted the depth and breadth of hastily expressed and (potentially time-limited) support we then saw from the cabinet and later from MPs.

It has cleared some political air for Sir Keir for now.

But the fundamentals, the catalysts that drove events towards this week’s crescendo, remain unaltered.

An unpopular government led by an unpopular prime minister will continue to prompt those on his own side to ponder alternative leaders, unless it and he respectively become less unpopular pretty quickly.

But it is also true that for many, many Labour MPs, whatever their view of their leader, the prospect of a turbulent leadership contest, while in government, feels irresponsible and potentially very damaging to them.

And yet tricky imminent elections point to headaches on the horizon.

In the meantime Downing Street has to deal with the consequences of how the last few weeks have played out.

The prime minister is having to make the best of things with Anas Sarwar, Labour’s leader in Scotland, who publicly called for him to resign. Sir Keir still wants Sarwar to become Scotland’s first minister. But the Labour campaign looks awkward, to put it gently, given the two men are at odds on the fundamental of whether Sir Keir is up to being prime minister.

Then there is the Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who appears to be able to get away with rather a lot while remaining in the cabinet. Streeting’s decision, off his own bat, to publish his text exchanges with Lord Mandelson prompted the prime minister to issue a coded rebuke of his health secretary. By publicly underlining the importance of a “managed process” for the release of material relating to the former ambassador, he was signalling Streeting’s unilateral release of exchanges clearly wasn’t.

It is a reminder of just how much material is due to be published relating to Lord Mandelson in the coming months, with huge potential for embarrassment personally and diplomatically.

For now, though, the prime minister appears fired up.

The adrenalin, frustration and anger provoked by recent days was visible publicly, which is rare for Sir Keir.

How much changes now, and how much you notice, are two of the key questions as the prime minister attempts to reset, yet again.