And so, farewell Keir Starmer. Hello, Andy Burnham.

I wouldn’t get comfortable. If Burnham manages to hold on for the next three years, I suspect we’ll get another Prime Minister after the next election. It’s questionable whether that Prime Minister will last a full term.

The problem is the United Kingdom, not Downing Street. Burnham is expected to do a “listening tour” of the country when he gets into office.

I don’t trust our political parties to tell him the truth: we’ll keep going through prime ministers as long as the ruling party fails to stop the rot at the heart of the country.

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The rot? The UK economy is, to borrow a common phrase, two financiers in a trenchcoat. It’s made up of credit card debt, AI companies that want to take your job and private equity.

People get their pay packets, pay their rent/mortgage, buy food and petrol and have little left for the rest of the month. Money goes up. You are broke but a small class of wealthy people are doing better than ever.

The rot started with Thatcher, but the problem crystallised with Brexit. The right correctly judged that the working class in Britain were being left behind in a liberal world that treated them with contempt.

It correctly judged that it could align those frustrations with centre-right Euroscepticism and the radical right’s desire for a new, anti-democratic future. It was an alliance of contradictions, but it was held together with a lie.

Voters wanted a better future. They wanted the current........

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