Andy Burnham isn't the Messiah - he’s very naughty with public money and will bankrupt UK

Starmer's long-awaited resignation is making way for an even more rapid descent into the abyss we all feared – an Andy Burnham premiership. And there's no shortage of column inches to be filled on why Starmer himself was utterly unsuitable to be PM. He led from the back. He had no plan before the election (despite having years to prepare). And he had no real idea what to do with power once he'd got it. When things went wrong, he threw whoever was nearest under the bus and carried on.

These are all true, well-deserved criticisms. But also, I'm afraid, slightly beside the point. Because the more I look at it, the less these feel like Starmer's failings and the more they look like the actual job description. Just look at the string of hooligans we've had in Downing Street over the years and a pattern emerges. It's broken promises and weak resolve, with not a shred of vision beyond clinging on to power for as long as possible.

Cameron gambled the country on a referendum and bolted when it went wrong. May couldn't deliver the one thing she was hired to deliver. Johnson promised the earth and governed like a man allergic to detail. Truss was famously outlasted by a head of lettuce. Sunak was a technocrat in an ill-fitting suit, managing the country's decline like a spreadsheet. And now Starmer, who turned the biggest majority in a generation into the shortest premiership in living memory, and had the same problem of his predecessors – a profound inability to mean what they say and do what they mean.

And here's the thing every one of them seems to forget – voters will forgive a great deal. They'll forgive incompetence and a bit of dithering. They might even wave through the odd scandal. But what they won't forgive is being taken for fools. Which is what makes the coming handover so galling. Because swapping Starmer for Burnham is simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Burnham is being hailed as some kind of messiah and, for the life of me I can't work out why. His whole pitch rests on Greater Manchester being a model the rest of the country should follow. Why? The city under his watch has suffered the same ills you'll find in any major British metropolis – too much spending, dodgy public services, a bloated bureaucracy, and residents drowning in debt. This is the record we're being asked to roll out nationwide?

Then there's how he handles public money. Burnham’s Greater Manchester Combined Authority is facing a Court of Appeal challenge over a meeting he chaired during which £120million in loans was signed over to a luxury property developer despite nobody bothering to check whether its backer was good for the money – meaning taxpayers could have lost the lot.

That cash went into high-end city-centre flats, which is curious given Burnham had promised the opposite: to steer public money towards affordable homes, not luxury towers. Out of 11,000 homes his flagship fund helped build, just 503 were affordable – under 5%. And this is the man Labour reckons will save it: a career politician who lost a leadership contest not once but twice, with one of those defeats coming courtesy of Ed Miliband? That's a feat so embarrassing it would make any sane person quit politics altogether.

The motley crew of professional useless people now jostling for jobs in his soon-to-be Cabinet only underlines how bereft of real talent the Labour Party is. Wes Streeting, according to Labour insiders, fancies himself as Chancellor — and God help us all if he gets it.

That this is anything but an amicable handover is the worst-kept secret in Westminster. Starmer’s team has made little effort to hide the bad blood. And if you think Burnham's hurried, half-cobbled transition bodes well for the country, I have a bridge to sell you.

Starmer spent YEARS in opposition and still turned out to be spectacularly useless. So what exactly do we expect from a man with no mandate, who's been outside Westminster for years, and has had mere weeks to throw a transition team together?

But the most baffling part of this whole fiasco is the direction it points in. Reform is surging in the polls. Voters are drifting rightward in ever greater numbers. The message couldn't be clearer. And yet Labour strategists have somehow concluded the country wants someone even further to the left. You couldn't make it up.