Voters in the suburbs of Wigan in north west England will choose Britain’s next prime minister – the seventh in a decade. Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham will fight a by-election for the parliamentary seat of Makerfield. If he wins, he is sure to succeed Keir Starmer as Labour leader and prime minister. The change would give Labour a strong chance of avoiding a repeat of the meltdown it has just suffered in Wales at the 2029 UK general election.

It is breathtaking how quickly Labour’s 2024 landslide has turned to ashes. The blame firmly lies with Keir Starmer. In 2022, I wondered whether he could be the quiet man who transformed British politics. In 2024, he won because voters were sick of the Conservative Party’s disastrous performance and sickened by Boris Johnson’s lies over pandemic parties. But we also thought, wrongly, that Starmer would preside over calm competence, growing the economy and building a fairer society. How wrong we were.

It’s often said that Starmer is a decent man who just isn’t suited to politics. But he has proved himself utterly unprincipled, sacrificing friends and officials – including two cabinet secretaries, top foreign office official Olly Robbins, two chiefs of staff and at least two heads of comms – rather than taking responsibility for his failures. The man is shameless.

Many thought that Starmer would be well prepared for government, given that after 2022 Labour overwhelmingly likely to win the 2024 general election. How wrong we were. The most baffling thing is that the hapless prime minister keeps making elementary, disastrous mistakes, which the most inexperienced adviser should have helped him avoid.

Whenever a prime minister made a disastrous decision, my late father would lament that they’d been badly advised. I retorted that PMs had to own their decisions. Starmer’s former guru Morgan McSweeney has been rightly criticised for his contribution to the government’s terrible performance, but many blame Starmer’s own arrogance and stubbornness, and lack of political judgement. The proverbial buck stops with him.

Yet Starmer’s government has been destroyed by inaction as well as action. Jess Phillips, the respected safeguarding minister, provided a devastating indictment in her resignation letter:

‘Over a year ago I presented solutions, long worked on by brilliant civil servants that would end the ability for children in the UK to take naked images of themselves. 91% of online child sex abuse is self-generated by children groomed, tricked and exploited in to abuse. The technology exists to stop children being able to take naked images of themselves. We could make this possible on every phone and device in the country. We could stop this abuse. It has taken me a year to get you to agree to even threaten to legislate in this space. Not legislate, just threaten. This is the definition of incremental change. Nothing bold about it. The announcement was meant to be in March, I’m still on a promise this will happen in June, I’ve given up believing it. How many children were left without a safety net in the time we dilly dallied and worried about tech bosses?’

Danny Finkelstein, the Tory peer and Times columnist, summarised Keir Starmer’s 2024 election pitch to voters: ‘Britain is broken and we promise not to do anything to fix it’. It was both perceptive and prescient.

Can Burnham do it?

Andy Burnham is taking a huge risk in standing in Makerfield. Voters in the past have reacted badly to being asked to vote for a leader in a forced by-election. In January 1965, foreign secretary Patrick Gordon Walker lost the by election engineered to give him a seat in the House of Commons. (He had unexpectedly lost his seat at the general election that elected Harold Wilson’s Labour government after the Tory candidate used the n-word in an outrageous racist campaign against Gordon Walker.)

Nigel Farage’s bandwagon, Reform UK, will fancy its chances a month after thrashing Labour in the local council election. Its chances may be boosted as Makerfield voters are asked to choose a new MP less than two years after electing Josh Simons in the general election. But Burnham has the advantage of being the very popular mayor of Greater Manchester, and a canny operator who will tackle all these risks head on. He may be helped by the kind of ‘stop Reform’ tactical voting that helped Plaid Cymru win the Senedd election in Wales. He’s also a Westminster outsider after almost a decade away from London. He can point to Manchester’s rebirth (which started before his election as mayor) and a track record of partnership with business. Burnham has an infectious, yet modest, charm that we’ve missed in our recent leaders, along with the power to explain and persuade. (It’s extraordinary how few of our seven PMs since Blair have had these essential qualities for a modern leader.)

In truth, Burnham had no option to stand at Makerfield, although it would have been so much better had Labour allowed him to stand in the Gorton and Denton by-election in February, won by the Greens with Labour falling to third place behind Reform.

If Burnham wins, he will surely become Labour leader and prime minister within months. That will cue more outrage about an unelected prime minister, something the Tories never concerned themselves with when they were repeatedly replacing prime ministers. This constant change at the top is extraordinary, and we should ask why political parties keep choosing utterly unsuitable candidates for party leader and PM. We expect doctors, teachers and train drivers to undergo rigorous training. How can you become PM without any training or qualifications – let alone aptitude for the job? No wonder they fail spectacularly in office, with disastrous consequences for our country.

Finally, it is time that Britain was led by someone who believes in devolving power to the regions and nations. In the 19th and early 20th century, municipal innovation made cities like Manchester and Birmingham globally powerful. Burnham could be the man to unleash that energy again.

Postscript: the day I met Andy Burnham

I met Andy Burnham. Once. For a few minutes. I was at the 2011 Labour party conference in Liverpool for work, and PR agency Lansons kindly gave invited gave me a place at their table at the Labour party dinner the evening after Ed Miliband’s leader’s speech. Towards the end of the evening, Burnham, then shadow education secretary, chatted to us, exuding that easy charm that has served him so well as Greater Manchester mayor.