Andy Burnham’s supporters are doing their damnedest to make sure their man replaces Sir Keir Starmer without a leadership election. Instead, they want a coronation. It isn’t hard to see why. He has nothing new to offer. Put the two men side-by-side on a hustings, and they’d mouth the same vague words about ‘change’ and ‘hope’, although Burnham will deliver them with a bit more warmth and humanity. That charm will quickly wear thin once he’s in power and fails to deliver. As he will. It’s inevitable.

Burnham won’t have a mandate. This isn’t democracy. It’s a coup, and a hard-left coup at that. But for a few weeks. Labour will be energised, as it liberates itself from the dogged, frustrating Starmer. Activists are dewy-eyed today, but they were dewy-eyed two years ago after Starmer’s ‘loveless landslide’, and look how that ended.

Labour has crushed us with tax after tax, let spending and borrowing race out of control, and burdened us with dismal cabinet ministers such as Rachel Reeves, Ed Miliband and Angela Rayner. Shortly after the election, I described this trio as Labour’s economic suicide squad, and today we’re seeing the results. Nobody will shed a tear for Starmer’s fall, apart from the man himself and his doughty wife. But we’ll all be crying our eyes out as we discover that instead of things getting better, they’re going to get an awful lot worse.

Andy Burnham isn’t going to enjoy this any more than the rest of us. He loves to be loved, but when voters discover he hasn’t got an actual plan, the hate will flow. Starmer was able to hunker down in his office and plough on with the paperwork, convincing himself he was doing a great job. By contrast, Burnham will be traumatised by the tsunami of frustration heading his way.

The UK economy is on the brink of meltdown. But every idea Burnham and his backers have will only make it worse. He wants to nationalise more, tax more and spend more. But this will only accelerate the disastrous policies of the last 20 years, which have left 53.3% of households taking more out of the welfare state than they pay in. That disastrous ratio will only increase as the population ages, and young people fail to find jobs. It is quite literally unsustainable.

Burnham seems likely to fire Chancellor Rachel Reeves, but she’ll leave him a nasty parting gift. She borrowed another £23.3billion in May, far exceeding forecasts of £17.7billion. Labour is on course to borrow £140billion in total this year. The UK already pays the highest rate of debt interest in the world, and this will increase once our debt burden exceeds £3 trillion, as it soon will. If Burnham feels obliged to appoint mad Ed Miliband as Chancellor, it’s game over.

Burnham’s ‘King of the North’ schtick may have tickled voters in Manchester and Makerfield, but it’s going to wear pretty thin in the rest of the country. Most Britons don’t live in the North and don’t have much time for regional self-mythologising. They just want to pay the bills and crack on. Burnham pleased 24,000 Brits in Makerfield. He’ll find the remaining 70 million much harder to convince. Especially if he caves to left-wing demands to rip up the manifesto and hike income tax and VAT.

Burnham’s popularity is already cratering; his rating has fallen from +9 to -11 in just weeks. It will slide further and faster the closer he gets to No 10. It’s inevitable. Burnham needs to make tough decisions to cut spending and get the economy growing, but he’ll be pushed from pillar to post, grinning inanely, as hard-left ideologues like Ed Miliband, Angela Rayner and Louise Haigh run rings round him.

Almost nobody in Labour has run a business or worked in a world beyond activist politics. They haven’t got a clue how to turn things around, and the bond market is terrified of their economic illiteracy. We’re heading further down the road to decline, and at an ever faster speed. Soon we may hanker for Keir Starmer‘s stubborn ineptitude. We might even think things were better under the hapless Rachel Reeves. That’s how bad it could get.