Back in the day, when the world was young and innocent, before anyone had ever heard of Brexit and when the good peoples of the planet Earth thought of Donald Trump as an eccentric but essentially harmless self-publicist, a 40-year-old politician of some rising fame put his name forward for the leadership of the British Labour Party and was convincingly eliminated from the race with less than nine per cent of the vote.

That was in 2010, and the party had just lost an election, as the premiership of Gordon Brown – and a global financial crisis – had ended Labour's 13 years in power.

At that point, Andy Burnham had already, in the space of just three years, served in three Cabinet posts, as chief secretary to the Treasury, culture secretary, and health secretary.

When Ed Miliband became Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Burnham took the shadow education portfolio, and then returned to health, before standing again for Labour's top job when his party lost another election in 2015.

Widely seen as a centrist continuity candidate, Burnham had come a distant second in that contest to the self-consciously radical left-winger Jeremy Corbyn- critics regard Corbyn, especially from the right and parts of the political center, as radical because his policies represented a break from the centrist approach the party adopted since the 1990s. He went on to serve for a year on Corbyn's front bench as shadow home secretary, but quit to pursue his dream of becoming the mayor of Greater Manchester, one of the UK's most populous and industrialised urban areas.

This might be considered a strange dream for someone born and brought up in and around Liverpool, northwest England's sworn rival to Manchester in football, music, and so many other things. It might be thought even stranger that Mr. Burnham has, since then, been elected to Manchester's mayoralty on three consecutive occasions – in 2017, 2021, and most recently in 2024.

It was doubtless that hat trick of Mancunian wins which emboldened Andy Burnham to chance his arm for a third time at securing the leadership of the Labour Party… an ambition which he has, of course, publicly almost-but-not-quite denied.

Last autumn, at the time of Labour's annual conference – which happened to be held in his native city of Liverpool – Burnham and his supporters had started to express relatively subtle but significant doubts as to the efficacy of Keir Starmer's first year in Downing Street.

With Burnham's popularity significantly higher than the Prime Minister's own in national opinion polls, many Labour members and parliamentarians had at the time come to see him as a credible successor to Sir Keir's ailing regime.

In the last week of January, Andy Burnham announced his wish to stand as a candidate for a forthcoming by-election in the Greater Manchester area.

He was supported in this by former Labour leader (and current Energy Secretary) Ed Miliband, London Mayor Sadiq Khan, former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, and current deputy party leader Lucy Powell.

His application to have his name considered by the local Labour branch was, however, rejected by his party's National Executive Committee, on the grounds that his departure from his mayoral role would trigger a costly and undesirable election in Manchester.

Many people in the media, the party and the public believed that his application to stand for parliament again was blocked because a seat in the House of Commons would be a prerequisite for him to launch another bid for the Labour leadership.

Mr. Starmer himself was known to have been one of the members of the committee who voted to prevent the candidacy of his potential future challenger.

This was not a good look for the Prime Minister, and is reported to have gone down especially badly with quite a few of his backbenchers. Some political pundits said this was the beginning of the end for Sir Keir’s premiership.

11 years ago, when he stood against Jeremy Corbyn, Andy Burnham was thought to be the centrist candidate. But in 2026, as Keir Starmer's administration lurched further to the right – as a result of fiscal constraints caused by the Conservatives' mismanagement of the economy, and by the parlous state of public services he inherited, and in response to the rising threat of the Far Right in the form of Nigel Farage's Reform UK – this year, in these less innocent and less forgiving times, Mr. Burnham seemed to his fans like the only available leftist alternative to Starmer’s government – albeit one who had characterised himself as "mainstream" and who has been characterised by others as representing the Labour Party's "soft left".

He also represented for many the last best hope that his party, if ever under his leadership, might continue in power after the next general election.

But even as Burnham was tossed back into the backwaters of regional politics, his challenge to the PM’s authority continued to sting. This ghost from the party’s past had marked Sir Keir as yesterday’s man.

The bar placed on Andy Burnham’s candidacy made a challenge to Keir Starmer's leadership seem not less but all the more likely, given the dissatisfaction voiced by some of his MPs at his decision to banish his rival back to the industrial North.

Like a precarious ruler trying desperately to put off the day of his downfall, Mr. Starmer seemed to be putting not only party before country but his own political survival before both.

And, as if things weren’t bad enough for the Prime Minister in January, in February they got much, much worse – when it emerged that he hadn’t just knowingly appointed a known associate of a convicted American sex-offender to be the UK’s ambassador in Washington, but that this disreputable diplomat had once taken payments from the notorious billionaire and had supplied him with government secrets.

This revelation quickly forced the resignation of Mr. Starmer’s chief of staff, a political operator of questionable judgment who had advised his boss on the appointment.

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All this provoked a tumult of outrage across the nation.

How – brayed Nigel Farage – could Starmer have trusted a man who turned out to have been named multiple times in the Epstein files... of course, ignoring the fact that his own dear friend in the White House, and he himself, had also appeared repeatedly in those documents?

The departure of Keir Starmer’s chief of staff was swiftly followed by the resignation of his director of communications.

That Downing Street colleague should not be confused with Sir Keir’s former director of communications, now in the House of Lords, who later that week was suspended from the parliamentary party for his own historical association with a different sex-offender.

That same week, Starmer fired the head of the Civil Service in a process described by many as messy, a move which the leader of the Liberal Democrats left the premier with nobody left to blame.

The chaos in Downing Street had amplified opposition and backbench grumbling into louder calls for the Prime Minister to quit, not least from the leader of the Scottish Labour Party.

It is rumoured that other senior party members had been expected to raise their heads above the parapet, but, for the while at least, none followed.

However, by that point, seasoned commentators were again reaching for their increasingly dog-eared lists of prospective Labour leadership challengers... all the usual suspects, of course, but also one surprisingly fresh face, in the form of a parliamentary newcomer and decorated war hero who might, some think, offer an appealing alternative to the drum-beating nationalism of Reform.

(We may hear more of him later, though it’s unclear whether this veteran of many a bruising military campaign would be willing to withstand his party’s perennial infighting.)

Whoever may eventually be chosen to succeed him – whether it’s before or after the drubbing Labour’s expected to receive in this May’s local and regional elections – it’s been painfully clear that, as the BBC’s political editor put it, Mr. Starmer’s “predicament is dire”.

He has had what the same reporter described as a “political near-death experience” – and his jeopardy isn’t over yet.

In what another BBC journalist called “yet another U-turn”, the government had tried to postpone 30 of those local council elections, but backtracked on that plan when faced with a legal challenge led by Reform UK – thus looking doubly timorous, afraid to face the electorate and afraid to face the courts.

In Shakespeare's Scottish play, the murderous usurper Macbeth is famously warned by a trio of treacherously prophetic witches that he will never be vanquished until "Great Birnam Wood" comes to his castle at Dunsinane. (Which it of course eventually does: his enemies approach by camouflaging themselves as trees.)

So, it now very much looks like, sooner or later, someone will be coming to take down Sir Keir, whether a plainspoken northern outsider brazenly bearing the naked flame of their burning ambition, a fresh-faced knight in shining armour, or a stealthy and weaselly Cabinet colleague, approaching quietly disguised as a friend.

Coming like Great Birnam Wood? Well, at least, like Greater Manchester's Burnham would... if ever given the chance... while other treacherous allies continue to wait in the wings.

There had been a moment at the start of the second week of February when it looked like Keir Starmer was about to be toppled from his perch.

But the Deputy Prime Minister had eventually come to his aid, and had then been followed by a grudging flood of other senior supporters.

The PM had then faced his own MPs in a private meeting in which some present said he’d seemed to be a different man, and others said they wished he had been.

But certain voices in the press had even then started to wonder whether our current premier wasn’t preferable after all to some of the more unsavoury alternatives, not least a brazenly ambitious health secretary with close ties to the disgraced ambassador, or a former deputy fired for imprudent financial conduct and emphatically on the left of the party.

So, the PM hangs on, his parliamentary authority weakened but his moral authority perhaps strengthened in some quarters of the press and the public... especially among those who felt that it seemed rather unfair that the political leader whose position has been most threatened by the Epstein scandal is one of those not mentioned at all in the infamous files.

And all this may even have left Mr. Starmer’s enemies looking more exposed, more vulnerable, more opportunistic, more hypocritical and more foolish than they did before they tried to blow all of this up.

The Leader of the Opposition declared that it’s “still a matter of when, not if, he goes”.

Yes, that’s certainly true. But then isn’t that sentiment also tragically true for all of us?