Judging by the acclamation which has greeted the second coming of Andy Burnham you’d be forgiven for assuming that he’d just won a 1997-style general election landslide.Sky News even scrambled a helicopter to follow the train bringing the Manchester Messiah to London.Hail the conquering hero, saviour of the nation!Who says we don’t do Presidential politics in Britain? This sure looked Presidential to me.Soon he will be installed as our next Prime Minister following Surkeir’s lachrymose resignation speech.There’s just one problem with this narrative. Nobody voted for him to become PM. He has no popular mandate.To put things in proper perspective, in 1997 Tony Blair led Labour to a stunning victory with more than 13,500,000 votes on a 71 per cent turnout everywhere from Scotland’s Western Isles to the Southern tips of England.By contrast, Burnham received just shy of 25,000 votes on a 58.7 per cent turnout in the suburbs of Wigan. That’s roughly about a third of those eligible to vote in the constituency.Hardly the overwhelming endorsement Burnham’s cheerleaders in the Labour Party and the Westminster media bubble would have us believe. And certainly not justification for immediately making him PM.Yet the Red Sea is parting to facilitate the Messiah’s safe passage to Number 10 Downing Street without bothering to trouble the wider electorate.All the indications are that a man who has twice failed to become Labour leader in an open contest is likely to be anointed unopposed, writes Richard Littlejohn Judging by the acclamation which has greeted the second coming of Andy Burnham you’d be forgiven for assuming that he’d just won a 1997-style general election landslideAll the indications are that a man who has twice failed to become Labour leader in an open contest is likely to be anointed unopposed after Wes Streeting withdrew his candidacy/failed to get the backing of enough MPs to mount a challenge – or more likely has been bought off with the promise of a big Cabinet job under Burnham.Yes, both Labour and the Tories have changed Prime Ministers mid-term in the past. But in each case the new PM was a sitting MP who stood at the General Election.Andy Burnham (maybe that should be Andy Capp, given that he’s the so-called King of the North) wasn’t even on the ballot in 2024. He was Mayor of Manchester, promising to serve a full five-year term.As soon as it became apparent that Surkeir was dead meat, Burnham had no hesitation in walking away from the city he professes to love to further his own ambition on a larger stage.When the expendable Labour MP Josh Simons agreed to stand down to smooth Burnham’s way back to Westminster, I told you that this wasn’t democracy in action – it was an anti-democratic palace coup.I also predicted that Burnham would win, even though Reform had swept the board in Makerfield at the local elections.Yes, there was popular support for Burnham, given he was a local lad and the region’s best known politician. But this was also a ‘get Starmer out’ and ‘stop Farage’ by-election.The Left-wing parties, Greens and Lib Dems, and some Tories coalesced around Burnham. Rupert Lowe’s Restore robbed Reform of a few thousand votes but didn’t influence the outcome in the event.The only candidate who could get rid of Starmer was Burnham. Had the Reform candidate won, Starmer would have written him off as ‘far Right’ and vowed to stay put and fight.Only a couple of weeks ago, Surkeir was telling a Sunday newspaper that he intended to lead Labour into the next General Election and remain Prime Minister for ten years.The great irony here is that when Burnham does become PM, he will owe his good fortune to Nigel Farage. If Reform hadn’t routed Labour in the local elections, there wouldn’t have been blind panic in the party’s ranks and Starmer would have been safe for a while.Nor would there have been a wholly unnecessary and cynically manufactured by-election to propel Burnham back to Westminster.Whether Andy Capp is the saviour of the nation, or more accurately Labour, remains to be seen.As I wrote at the time, what Labour doesn’t seem to grasp – or deliberately cares to ignore – is that the local elections weren’t just a rejection of Never Here Keir, they were a repudiation of this entire, rotten Labour Government, which needs to be swept away before it can do any more damage.Yes, both Labour and the Tories have changed Prime Ministers mid-term in the past. But in each case the new PM was a sitting MP. Andy Burnham wasn’t even on the ballot in 2024 You can always rely on the political class, especially Labour, to draw the wrong conclusions from any electoral setback.In the aftermath of the local elections, I wrote: ‘Reform sweeps the board in the Brexit-heavy Red Wall, and Labour draws the conclusion that it’s a vote for rejoining the EU.‘Reform takes Essex and the eastern seaboard and the Tories win back Westminster and Wandsworth, and yet Labour claims that what voters really want is the ‘King of the North’, who wasn’t on the ballot at the last General Election, to be anointed as our next Prime Minister.‘How stupid do they think we are? When are they going to stop insulting our intelligence? Their blinkered arrogance and sense of entitlement is breathtaking.’Yes, Starmer had to be made to walk the plank. But what’s also astonishing is that among 400-odd Labour MPs at Westminster they couldn’t come up with a single decent replacement.Which speaks volumes for the fourth-rate rabble of far-Left union officials, social workers and teachers who belly-flopped over the line as part of the loveless landslide.So in desperation they reach out to the Manchester Messiah, a man with no legitimate claim to the keys to No 10.We are braced for a lurch even further to the Left under Burnham, who favours higher taxes including a return of Gordon Brown’s 50p top rate tax hand grenade.We might even see a revival of the sinister Leveson restrictions on our free Press, if the presence in Makerfield of those gruesome twosome Hacked Off headbangers Steve Coogan and Hugh Grant is any indication.But then again, it’s difficult to know what he believes.One minute he wants to rejoin the EU, the next he says he respects the referendum result. Burnham’s policies are both fluid and elusive. He’s never been subjected to the kind of forensic grilling we could expect from, say, the Daily Mail’s Andrew Neil.The one thing we can almost certainly expect is a doubling down on the Net Zero madness. Yet in another by-election in Aberdeen, the Tories crushed Labour and the SNP over the madness of importing gas and oil while refusing to drill our own plentiful reserves in the North Sea.That staggering victory for the Conservatives was as much a repudiation of Ed Miliband as Makerfield was of Starmer. So if the PM had to resign, why didn’t the Energy Secretary have to go, too?But instead, Miliband – responsible for destroying jobs and lumbering us with the highest electricity prices in the developed world – is being tipped as the next Chancellor.Wherever Miliband lands, Burnham’s government are certain to take us further down the road to ruin.Astonishingly, we are told that in charge of allocating Cabinet jobs is one Louise Haigh, the until-recently pink-haired horror sacked by Starmer for lying about a fraud conviction. And Angry Ginge Rayner is nailed-on for a comeback.Burnham is already under pressure from both backbenchers and some likely Cabinet ministers to rip up the 2024 manifesto and turn sharp Left.I’ve been arguing since February that we need a General Election, especially if Burnham was parachuted into power with a new hard-Left agenda. But we’re not going to get one, unless the bond markets pull the plug.The Manchester Messiah hasn’t plotted his way to Downing Street to risk throwing it all away before he’s got his feet under the table – even though assorted Labour luminaries including Burnham and Rayner were quick to demand an election when the Tories changed PM.That may be fine by the one-in-three who voted for him in Makerfield, but the other 70-odd million of us in Banana Republic Britain won’t get a say in it for the next three years.And that’s an anti-democratic disgrace.