Andy Burnham had it right. “This is a final chance to change,” he said in his victory speech. “This is what people said directly to me on the hundreds of doorsteps that I stood on. We must hear it. We must act upon it, and we must get it right. There will be no second chance, but it is a chance now.”

This really is the last chance saloon. Not just for Labour, but for our whole way of conducting politics. It is a last chance for mainstream politics, based on the promise that democracy can improve people’s lives in practical ways. The promise that we conduct ourselves in rational terms of national improvement.

This promise has been left unfilled since the financial crash. We have lost nearly two decades to stagnation, pessimism, incompetence and despair. Unless this is halted now, voters will take a chance – probably on Nigel Farage, or perhaps on some other nightmarish huckster. Once they are in power there is no guarantee they can be extracted again. And they will inject the poison of their politics into the national bloodstream: race riots, grievance, victimhood, authoritarianism.

We can’t do this again. Another change of prime minister before the 2029 election would constitute a level of chaos akin to that of the fag-end of the Tory government. It has to be Andy Burnham and it has to work, or we’re all in a lot of trouble.

The Manchester mayor stood in Reform’s heartland, a seat composed disproportionately of older,........

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