Welcome to the cabaret, Andy Burnham. Last year, the editor of this magazine wrote about ‘Weimar Britain’: the fear that political instability, economic turmoil and rising anti-Semitism was making our country as decadent and dangerous as inter-war Germany. As our sixth prime minister of the post-Brexit decade departs, and our seventh looms into view, we have developed a national addiction to perma-crisis, seemingly trapped in a game of ‘Topple the PM’. We are far from a January 1933 moment. But the joke isn’t funny any more.

This turbulence is not inescapable, though. What is needed is a premier able to stay the course, to set out how they want to change Britain and to discover the drive and charisma to bring their party and the country with them. What is needed is a narrative; not soulless spin or a fairy story about what could be done, but a set of values to believe in and a vision to embrace. Keir Starmer had many failings as prime minister, but his inability to explain why he wanted the job and what he sought to do with it was his earliest, greatest and, ultimately, fatal flaw.

Maybe this time, we’ll be lucky. In his nine years as the mayor of Greater Manchester, Burnham has proved adept at projecting a sense of mission.

Compared with a premier who cannot name a favourite book, Burnham is a quantum leap forward

His ‘Manchesterism’ is much less substantial than his hymns to ‘business-friendly socialism’ suggest, combining long-standing council initiatives to attract inward investment with his own enthusiasm for painting buses yellow and showing up in short shorts to fun runs and fêtes. Yet his repeated re-election and his Makerfield triumph show that Burnham’s popularity is real – he is a genuine champion for his area, enthusiastic and recognisable. His bloodless coup against his leader was compelled by a magnetism Starmer so palpably lacks. Whether Burnham’s outsider sheen survives his Westminster return remains to be seen, however.

Burnham also possesses more of a hinterland than Starmer does. At Cambridge, he was a conscientious if unspectacular student, as happy on the football pitch as he was dissecting Middlemarch. But compared with a premier who claims not to dream and who cannot name a favourite book, he is a quantum leap forward.

While Starmer is a product of the rarefied world of international law, Burnham is shaped by his lifelong faith: a Catholic communitarian, raised in the north-west, steeped in the teachings of Derek Worlock about solidarity with the disadvantaged and working–class dignity. Burnham once branded Labour ‘the enfranchisement’ of the catechism on Earth.

Burnham could not be anything other than Labour. But he possesses a pragmatism and a willingness to work with opponents that has earned him a reputation as a capable political operator and a likable man. Of course, more substantial tests should exist for leading a G7 country, a security council member and a nuclear power than whether someone would be good company in the pub. But playing the man of the people has been central to Nigel Farage’s appeal for two decades; to him, Burnham poses a genuine threat.

A year ago, Farage, a lifelong Thatcherite, was undergoing a strange transformation, advocating for abolishing the two-child benefit cap and nationalising water and steel. Patently insincere, this attempted triangulation has been tacitly abandoned. But it gestured in the direction of the same political centre that successive governments have been aiming for since Brexit: tough on immigration, but economically interventionist.

Increasingly, Burnham is combining advocacy for a more activist state with an embrace of Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s reforms to asylum and indefinite leave to remain, and a commitment to cutting welfare to increase defence spending. Although inchoate, this is targeted at Farage’s white working-class base. Pitching himself as a 21st-century James Callaghan – appropriate for the hottest summer since 1976 – Burnham could stump Reform by leading an affable, socially conservative and patriotic Labour into an early election.

But whatever Burnham’s own inclinations, he is vulnerable to capture by Labour’s left. Distanced from Starmer’s leadership, Burnham became a focal point for discontented left-wingers and found himself parroting their causes célèbres: electoral reform, rejoining the EU, denouncing neoliberalism and embracing wealth taxes. When last running for Labour’s leadership, Burnham suggested his first visit would be to Israel; this time, he must appease activists who want a mouthpiece for the Palestinian cause.

If Burnham wants to succeed as prime minister, he must also reject the siren calls of what Lord Glasman brands the ‘lanyard class’. Prioritising the ignominies of the no-nation left did for Starmer: the humiliation of the now-ditched Chagos deal, the shabbiness of trying to sneak in assisted suicide by the back door, the bankruptcy of U-turning on every cut that elicited a whimper from his back benches. To avoid Starmer’s fate, Burnham must not yield.

Even if they may arrive in Downing Street with an alarming regularity, each new premier deserves a chance to establish themselves. If Burnham follows his better instincts, he has the opportunity to use his inherited landslide majority to reshape the country, for better or for worse. If Burnham wishes history to be kind to him, he must attempt to write it; if he wants to end our national pantomime, he must tell a better story instead.