'Stakes couldn't be higher for Andy Burnham as Farage desperate to trip up Labour's wannabe saviour'

What if Labour front runner Andy Burnham loses the race? Win and the popular King of the North would be virtually nailed on to replace Keir Starmer as Prime Minister after next month’s crucial Makerfield by-election.

The stakes couldn’t be higher when victory is far from guaranteed and Nigel Farage will throw Reform’s financial resources at tripping up Labour’s wannabe saviour. The Greater Manchester Mayor contesting a seat with a vulnerable 5,000-ish majority, a fraction of the 13,400 majority overcome by the Greens recently in Gorton and Denton, is either courageous or desperate.

But, suddenly, all Labour’s hopes rest on a man who isn’t yet an MP and faces a pack of questions about where he’d actually take Labour.

The old joke about a Blairite, Brownite and Corbynite walking into a pub and the landlord saying, “Hi, Andy” requires Burnham to spell out exactly what Manchesterism is and what that would mean for disillusioned working-class voters across England, Wales and Scotland.

Lose and we would never learn, Starmer surviving a little longer before he is challenged and replaced by Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting, Ed Miliband or somebody else. The result would be yet more chaos.

The party’s survival potentially resting on Burnham’s shoulders underlines how far Labour has plummeted less than two years after securing a thumping Parliamentary majority, albeit on only 34% of the votes.

We’re in a fresh era of fractured politics and old maps are of limited value but history offers both encouragement and a nightmare for Burnham.

The encouragement is the story of Tory grandee Alec Douglas-Home running successfully as PM in a 1963 Kinross and Western Perthshire by-election, after an Establishment Conservative magic circle had already installed the then-peer in No10.

The nightmare is Harold Wilson’s first Foreign Secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, who lost a by-election in the “safe” Labour constituency of Leyton in 1965. He was trying to get back into the Commons after the Tories nicked his Smethwick seat a year earlier with a grotesque racist pitch.

If Labour’s running man becomes an MP, he’ll deserve his shot at No10.