Labour’s failures have made a rightwing authoritarian government not just a nightmare, but a plausible next chapter. Having enraged its natural voters – many of whom have flocked to the Greens – Labour MPs have clambered on to a lifeboat named Andy Burnham.

Do the rest of us blindly hop on board? Burnham is, indisputably, Labour’s best bet. He is the party’s most popular politician, and surely the figure best placed to win back voters lost to both the Greens and Reform. He has an easy northern charm, and some genuine progressive achievements to his name, secured with the limited powers he has as Greater Manchester’s mayor. But he has also benefited from not being at the centre of the great national political controversies of our age.

To be blunt: if he wants support from the left, which he will need to win power at a general election, he will have to earn it. Six years ago, Keir Starmer stood on a leadership platform that included public ownership, hiking taxes on the well-to-do, scrapping tuition fees and putting “human rights at the heart of foreign policy”. In retrospect, it now appears it was a deceitful ruse to con the Labour membership into installing a faction dedicated to crushing the left. A failure to scrutinise Burnham after that experience would smack of fatal naivety.

The first test must concern his own political journey. Burnham is a former Blairite special adviser who voted for the Iraq war. Under Ed Miliband, he shifted towards the soft left as shadow health secretary. After Labour’s rout in 2015, he launched his........

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