If Andy Burnham is the answer, what on earth was the question?The self-styled King of the North reckons he’s on track to win next Thursday’s Makerfield by-election then sweep south to depose Keir Starmer, whose job security is more precarious than ever after the devastating resignation of his defence secretary, John Healey.Few will mourn the demise of Starmer, the only prime minister in living memory to be accused by his own hitherto loyal defence secretary of failing to properly defend the nation. But it speaks volumes for the grim state of British politics that the Makerfield campaign provides no evidence that Burnham would be much of an improvement.The by-election has exposed Burnham to a modicum of scrutiny by the national media that he has escaped as mayor of Greater Manchester, where the local media, such as BBC North West and the Manchester Evening News, have been largely cheerleaders. He has not come out well from it.Defence has been steadily rising up the agenda during the Makerfield by-election. But Burnham has not had a word to say about it. He’s stayed schtum even after Healey’s resignation.You could argue by-elections should be about more local matters. But they are also a chance to pass judgment on a sitting government’s national record. This is especially true of Makerfield, which was triggered, remember, explicitly to propel Burnham into 10 Downing Street. Silence on the burning issue of our times is hardly appropriate from someone who wants to be our next prime minister.After all, he’s not been backward in coming forward with pronouncements on other matters. On Wednesday, citing his previous support for the families of the Hillsborough tragedy, he vowed to ‘stick by the Waspi women because they deserve some recompense for the unfairness’. The Waspi campaigners, who think (wrongly) that women born in the 1950s have been cheated out of their full state pension entitlement, praised him for showing ‘real courage’.The accolade was somewhat premature. In less than 24 hours, he was in full U-turn mode. A Burnham spokesman explained that ‘he accepts the final decision has been made in relation to financial compensation [for Waspi women]’. Turns out what he had in mind was earlier access for them to travel discounts such as bus passes. So not quite the fearless champion the Waspi women had thought. Silence on the burning issue of our times is hardly appropriate from someone who wants to be our next prime minister Our allies have had enough of Starmer strutting the world stage promoting ‘coalitions of the willing’They should not have been so gullible — for U-turns have been the default mode of Burnham’s by-election campaign.Having previously argued that migrants on work, family or student visas should have access to welfare handouts, Burnham came out against the idea in the by-election. Mass migration is not popular in Makerfield.At last year’s Labour Party conference he boasted he was not afraid to advocate Britain rejoining the European Union. In the by-election he has talked of ‘respecting the referendum result’, ‘not advocating’ a second referendum and effectively ruling out rejoining for the foreseeable future. Makerfield voted overwhelmingly for Brexit in 2016.He recently railed against the government for being ‘in hock to the bond markets’, though it wasn’t clear he had a clue what he was talking about. Anyway, no doubt on receipt of wiser advice, he kicked off his campaign promising to stick to Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules. Then, perhaps realising this rather hemmed in his big spending plans, he opined that the fiscal rules should be up for debate, leaving the good folks of Makerfield as mystified as the rest of us.Finally, when he was interviewed on BBC Newsnight last week, it became clear he didn’t even know what the fiscal rules were (there are only two of them, plus an additional rule covering welfare spending).All this matters big-time because, if he succeeds in his mission to defenestrate Starmer, he will become prime ministerconsiderably less well-prepared for the top job than Starmer in July 2024 — and we now know to our cost he was not at all well-prepared.‘This is no time for a novice,’ Gordon Brown once famously declared, trying to fend off David Cameron in the run-up to the 2010 election. Well, Burnham is very much the novice and, though he’s spent 16 years in Westminster (which rather belies the ‘beer, chips and gravy’ image this Cambridge graduate tries to project), nothing he did then prepares him to be prime minister now.He would move into 10 Downing Street inheriting a government in chaos in the wake of Healey’s resignation, its international reputation in shreds after the departing defence secretary exposed Starmer’s hypocritical sham of talking big and spending small. ‘The UK’s standing in Nato is at an all-time low,’ says a former (British) deputy supreme allied commander of the Atlantic Alliance.Our allies have had enough of Starmer strutting the world stage promoting ‘coalitions of the willing’ and bigging up Britain’s role in various allied military initiatives while starving British defence of the funds needed for us to make a credible contribution.Perhaps the most damning part of Healey’s brutal resignation letter is where he reveals that between 2027 and 2030, UK defence spending is projected to rise from 2.6 per cent of GDP to 2.68 per cent – a measly increase of 0.08 per cent, even though it is towards the end of the decade that British Intelligence (and the intelligence services of other Nato powers) assess that Russia will be at its most threatening towards Nato. Having previously argued that migrants on work, family or student visas should have access to welfare handouts, Burnham came out against the idea in the by-electionStarmer’s miserly response to this growing threat is unfathomable. The revelation of that 0.08 per cent rise alone makes him unfit to be prime minister. It also confirms that the Nato target of 3 per cent of GDP on defence by 2030 (or a little thereafter), to which Starmer signed up, is not even going to be attempted by Britain — and that 3.5 per cent by 2035, to which Starmer also signed up, is mere fantasy. It’s not even on the PM’s wish list.No doubt Donald Trump will have something to say about that at next week’s gathering of the G7 in France and the Nato council in Turkey on July 7. The more Labour’s defence spending is exposed as a hoax, the more ministers resort to lies, deception and deflection. Reeves’ Treasury accuses Healey (anonymously, of course) of wanting to cut spending on schools and hospitals to increase the defence budget. It is an outrageous, unwarranted smear on a man who is Labour to his fingertips.It’s also a lie. There are a ton of ways to find more for defence without taking a penny from schools or hospitals, starting with a ten-year pause on Ed Miliband’s Net Zero follies. By 2030 we will be spending £40 billion a year on subsidising renewable energy and another £9 billion on his carbon capture wheeze, a technology untested at scale which involves building underwater pipes to bury CO2 in the North Sea.Enough resources are being squandered on Net Zero to make up a big chunk of the defence shortfall — and that’s even before you start to tackle our ballooning welfare bill.A strong PM would have ordered Reeves, who is even more of the villain than Starmer in this sorry saga, to find the money Healey wanted – and raided Miliband’s budget as part of that process, making clear resistance would mean the sack.But Starmer is too weak to do any of that. More fundamentally, I doubt his heart is in it. Neither Starmer nor Reeves came into politics to spend more on defence. Both have a visceral, deep-seated aversion to military spending. They just don’t want to do it, whatever the growing threats we face.So, instead, they resort to fiddling the figures to make them look better. A parliamentary answer on February 16 this year revealed that the core defence budget is barely over 2 per cent of GDP. It’s bumped up to 2.5 per cent by including some intelligence and security spending and military pensions.It’s fanciful to think Burnham would do anything about this. The Treasury would run circles around him and the current pathetic trajectory of defence spending would remain the same. He will have many problems to grapple with and in most he will be out of his depth – nowhere more so that in defence.He hopes to be swept to power on a wave of Labour Party popularity. For a while, no doubt, he will enjoy a honeymoon with the wider public. But, I venture to suggest, before next spring has sprung he’ll probably be as unpopular then as Starmer is now. He’s not Labour’s new messiah. He’s just a likeable lad from the North with an inflated conceit of his abilities — and so much learning on the job to do it will likely sink him.