If Keir Starmer’s short, miserable tenure as Prime Minister can be summed up in one phrase, you could say that he is the opposite of Ronald Reagan: he has a unique disconnection with the people. 

His wooden manner, nasal monotone voice and inability to rouse a housefly have not helped him.

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Sir Keir Starmer holds back tears during his resignation speech Credit: EPA

Starmer left No10 after just 23 months in power Credit: EPA

Then there are his self-inflicted wounds, such as the bizarre decision to give away the Chagos Islands to another country which has no reasonable claim to them as well as closing the Rwanda scheme with no alternative workable plan in place to stall the tide of illegal migration.

Yet for all this, Labour’s biggest problem is not its leader; it is its own backbench MPs. 

The unravelling of Starmer’s premiership began just under a year ago when he was forced to backtrack on the very modest programme of welfare cuts which had been proposed by his Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, as well as his then work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall. 

The reforms wouldn’t even have succeeded in cutting the rapidly accelerating bill for Personal Independence Payments (PIPs) for long, merely temporarily holding it back to the tune of £5billion a year out of a total welfare budget of over £300billion. 

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Andy Burnham is gunning for Downing Street Credit: Reuters

Andy Burnham has confirmed he will be running for leadership Credit: Getty

Yet even that proved too much for Labour MPs who threatened a rebellion so large it could have wiped out the government’s massive majority. 

A more natural leader like Blair would at least have tried to talk his backbenchers around rather than simply abandoning the plan, undermining his Chancellor and leaving her a sobbing wreck on the Commons benches. 

But I doubt whether it would have made any difference. 

Too many of the current crop of Labour MPs could never, ever bring themselves to vote for any cut in welfare spending.

They see themselves as messiahs defending the poor and weak, regardless of ample evidence that many benefits are being over-claimed and in spite of Britain’s exploding public debt.

He did the same with the two-child benefit cap, which he said he would retain but then flip-flopped and abolished.

In contrast with many of his MPs, Starmer does at least have half an ear for the economists who are increasingly warning that Britain faces a final showdown with the bond markets in coming years.

Not so Labour’s woolly-headed backbenchers, who seem to think either that public spending will magically generate so much economic growth that it will pay for itself – or that billionaires have bottomless pockets that can be endlessly picked.

But if anyone thinks that Andy Burnham is going to be any different in this regard, they can think again. 

No wonder he is so popular among Labour MPs that a coronation now looks inevitable. 

They have worked out that he is an even more pliable pile of putty. 

He has already out flip-flopped Starmer.

He was going to tear up Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules, then he wasn’t. 

He was going to compensate the Waspi women, then he wasn’t.

He was going to nationalise the public utilities, then it seemed to be downgraded to a promise merely to bring them under greater government control.  

At the moment, Burnham may be appearing to be moving in the opposite direction to many of Labour backbenchers’ obsessions as he seeks to avert a bond market meltdown – not entirely successfully as bond yields rose on his by-election victory and then again when Starmer resigned this morning. 

But what Burnham has done is to signal that he has no consistency, no political convictions. 

He can easily be turned if enough pressure is applied.

Once installed in Downing Street, he will rapidly become the prisoner of the parliamentary Labour Party. 

And unlike Starmer, he won’t even have the comfort of a popular mandate from a general election victory.  

MPs will press him for every spending increase, every public sector pay award, every nationalisation they can, having fooled themselves that Starmer’s main failing is that he wasn’t left-wing enough.  

Britain will be doomed to spiral into a fiscal black hole so long as Labour remains in government.  

As we will learn before very long, the meltdown which happened under Liz Truss was merely a rehearsal for the real thing.