You’re just going to have to bear with me today. This is another of those columns which begins: I don’t know where to start.There’s been a song swirling round my head all weekend: Banana Republic by the Boomtown Rats, circa 1980. That was about the repressive Republic of Ireland, then run by ‘police and priests’ in black and blue uniforms.These days, it could be about what the Irish have always called ‘the mainland’.(Police And Thieves, by reggae star Junior Murvin, later covered by The Clash, would be more appropriate. The country is being stolen from under our very noses.)A few years ago, I coined the phrase Basket Case Britain. We even had a special rubber-stamp logo made up to go with the column.Nowadays, though, we’re way beyond basket case. We’re talking, in the words of Bob Geldof, Septic Isle.As for ‘police and priests’, the Boys In Blue are completely out of control, captured by the forces of DEI and the sinister cult of ‘anti-racism’ – as the Henry Nowak murder in Southampton confirms beyond a reasonable doubt.The new priesthood is the political class, desperate to impose their own warped, far-Left ideology on an unwilling, but no longer unsuspecting, public.In what kind of sane world did it become perfectly normal for someone who wasn’t even on the ballot at the last General Election to assume he’s going to be our next Prime Minister – with the full support of the Boys in the Bubble and the BBC?About the only true thing the disgraced, serpentine – and bestie of dead nonce Jeffrey Epstein – Petie Mandelson has ever said (in his EU days) was that ‘the era of pure representative democracy’ was coming to an end. Here’s the living proof. ‘King of the North’ Andy Pandy is already drawing up his agenda for government and planning to bring back ‘Queen of the North’ Angry Ginge as his personal Looby Loo, writes Richard Littlejohn‘Unprecedented’ is an over-used cliche these days. But how else to describe the Burnham putsch?A two-bob spiv who isn’t even an MP yet is measuring up the curtains at No 10. But it is widely reported as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.And it would appear that the Neanderthal ‘We’ve always been Labour in our house’ Muppets and the suicide jockeys who intend to vote for Rupert Lowe’s Restore party are rolling out the red carpet for him.If Burnham gets away with it, Chris Mullin will have to update his seminal 1980s political novel/TV series A Very British Coup.Who needs tanks in Whitehall when you’ve got mug punters in Makerfield and a ‘liberal’ media class clapping like performing seals?Last week, the BBC – less Auntie, more pervy Uncle in a Palestinian keffiyeh these days – put out a party political broadcast on behalf of Burnham. They didn’t call it that, of course, they pretended it was a regular edition of Question Time. But it pitted a smooth-talking former Cabinet Minister against a panel of tongue-tied opponents and a barking madwoman from the Monster Raving Green Party. Only one winner there. No need for penalties.There was also a helpful plant in the audience who declared – with reference to the inexperienced Reform UK candidate – that she’d rather vote for a career politician than a sexist plumber. As the late, great Peter Cook once remarked: You could get on the radio with stuff like that. It was probably handed to her on a piece of paper by a junior producer on the way in.Either that, or she was a union official pretending to be a member of the public, which is usually the case with QT’s ‘impartial’ audience. Burnham’s on-air admission that he was ‘planning to enter a leadership contest’ should such a thing be called, perish the thought, was presented as some sort of scoop.As a brilliant cartoon in His Majesty’s Daily Telegraph put it: we’re talking Popes and Catholics here, bears in woods.‘King of the North’ Andy Pandy is already drawing up his agenda for government and planning to bring back ‘Queen of the North’ Angry Ginge as his personal Looby Loo. A two-bob spiv who isn’t even an MP yet is measuring up the curtains at No 10 Who needs tanks in Whitehall when you’ve got mug punters in Makerfield and a ‘liberal’ media class clapping like performing seals?(These days, though, holed up in her ‘main home’ in Hove Actually, hundreds of miles from her Northern constituency, Rayner’s more Queen of the South, not to be confused with the Scottish third division football team from Dumfries or the fictional Mexican drugs baroness of the same nickname.)Burnham’s even outlined his agenda for government, which nobody outside of three men and a dog in a suburb of Wigan will have voted for. The other 68 million (or 70 million or whatever it is these days) of us won’t get a say in it.And despite leaks that he would hold a snap election, he now says he won’t – which is exactly what I told you last week. So we could be lumbered with Burnham for the next three years, propped up by 400 gormless Labour time- servers who couldn’t come up with a serious contender to car-crash PM Surkeir among them.One of Burnham’s flagship policies is to give so-called ‘asylum seekers’ (illegal or otherwise) the right to work the moment they land here. This at a time when one in seven households in Britain has nobody working and millions are claiming trebles-all-round benefits under Labour’s ‘bigger TVs for layabouts’ welfare regime.We used to call asylum seekers ‘illegal immigrants’ until the Left decided that was a bit harsh. Under Andy Pandy it can only be a matter of time before we have to call them ‘jobseekers’ entitled to ‘jobseeker’s allowance’ – or what we also used to call ‘the dole’.Burnham’s only other policy – apart from lying about his intentions to drag us back into the EU – is to jack up taxes still further, including reviving Gordon Brown’s vindictive 50p top rate.His ingenious revenue-raising idea is modelled on the Boomtown Rats’ Bob Geldof during Live Aid: ‘Give us your f%$£ing money.’Remember, you read it here first. Never mind Basket Case Britain, welcome to Banana Republic Britain.The leader of the GMB union monsters Labour over the jobs-destroying North Sea drilling ban. I wonder what my dear old mate Del Horn, a GMB officer in East London and Labour lifer, would have made of Miliband’s suicidal Net Zero madness. Del trained as a North Sea gas fitter. But that was when Labour stood for working people, not the wokerati. With summer holidays imminent, there’s more border chaos for British tourists/lorry drivers etc in Europe. We’re warned to expect delays of up to six hours at EU ports and airports because of the new digital entry/exit system aimed at causing as much inconvenience as possible to UK passport holders.Remember when Starmer sold out our fishing rights to the French for 12 years as part of his first ‘reset’ in exchange for a worth-less promise that UK citizens could now use ‘fast-track’ Euro e-gates?Yet we refuse to retaliate and continue to let EU nationals use our own fast-track gates at airports. Makes you proud to be British.Hypocritical Lefties are attacking the US (Vance/Musk etc) for ‘interfering’ in UK politics over the Henry Nowak murder.These are the very same people who ‘took the knee’ over George Floyd, shouted ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ at unarmed British police officers, flew to America to campaign for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden – not forgetting the Guardianistas who wrote an open letter to Americans in Clark County, Ohio, instructing them not to vote for George W. Bush.Deputy PM David Lammy says he’s complained to his mate Vice-President JD Vance. Given Lammy’s lame Mastermind performance, can we be sure he hasn’t spoken to JR Ewing from Dallas?