AS THE Starmer premiership finally implodes, gorged on its own fatuity and marinated in mass hostility, a host of questions are thrown up.

To none of them is Wes Streeting the answer. It takes a peculiar sort of political genius to imagine that installing a hardcore Blairite and champion of Israel, with a side order of buddying around with Peter Mandelson is going to save this Labour government.

Yet that is the plan afoot. Meet the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Hand-picked by the departed and disgraced Morgan McSweeney in its majority, and not chosen for brains, initiative or democratic responsiveness, they are indeed where I would look for buyers if I had a bridge to sell.

Still, even animals can sense danger, and there is hardly a Labour MP who cannot see it written all over the electoral map after May 7.

It comes in many guises — Reform, the Greens, Plaid Cymru, the Scottish National Party, independents here and there, even the Tories in places.

Seeing off any one of those challenges has proved considerably beyond Keir Starmer’s skill set. Seeing off all of them at once would challenge greater talents than those available among his putative successors.

Unsurprisingly, many Labour MPs, adherents of the McSweeney faction, seem ready to not merely vote for more of the same but to rush it into place with unseemly haste.

Streeting — Starmerism with a flicker of human emotion — is their candidate to maintain the hegemony of the Labour right.

The Health Secretary has divided his time of late between signing fresh contracts for Palantir to invade the NHS and shuffling cautiously leftwards, hoping that the pungent stink of his long association with Mandelson can be thus dispelled.

His haste — indecent hardly does justice — is to get in before the most menacing alternative is available. The candidate that appears to offer something akin to hope.

Hope is a sturdy plant, despite Starmer’s unending efforts to annihilate all traces of it. Presently hope is called Andy Burnham.

As one leading leftwinger put it to me, the Manchester mayor “is our star player.” That perception derives from the fact that he has, for the last nine years, been playing on a different pitch.

Two things only can be said about Burnham with confidence. One is that he is far more popular than any other Labour politician, or any politician at all. Had he been serving in Starmer’s Cabinet rather than in Manchester that would be unlikely to be the case, but that is a bullet he has dodged.

The second is that no-one can have any real idea what a Burnham-led Labour government would be like. Burnham is a shape-shifting politician who has dropped no more than hints and winks as to how he would diverge from the government’s present ruinous course. In modern parlance, he is a vibe more than a programme.

Yet the view is, in the words of another prominent left MP, that “only Burnham can stop a Reform government.”

Here is where hope runs up against evidence. Look at a ward map of Greater Manchester following last Thursday’s elections. The middle is monolithically Green. To the south, Stockport is Liberal Democrat orange. Then, all around a sea of Faragean turquoise. There is precious little red, mainly in Salford and Trafford. Project this map onto a national scale and you are looking at a Reform-led government.

And that is Manchester!

Still, most of the parliamentary left believes Burnham is worth waiting for. They feel Angela Rayner is too compromised by her loyal association with Starmer, and her tax problems, to be a viable alternative to Streeting in an immediate showdown.

Even Rayner herself would be happiest getting behind Burnham and will only stand if not doing so would leave the Health Secretary with a clear run at Downing Street. So hold on for Andy?

Godot famously never showed up, leaving those waiting for him eventually considering suicide. What might detain the mythic character?

First, there must be a by-election in a seat which Burnham could hypothetically win in the north-west.

Then he must be allowed to stand by a Labour executive which is the last redoubt of Starmer’s control over events. Word is that the stubborn Prime Minister would look to repeat his Burnham block of earlier this year, although he may no longer have enough juice left in the tank for that.

Finally, Burnham would have to actually win the chosen seat. There is surely a Burnham premium to be added to the vote Labour would otherwise get, but victory cannot be a given.

So the route to salvation is, as one MP put it, “a narrow path.” And possibly to a disappointing destination, with Reform still running the game.

There are those that console themselves with the evidence that support for the hard right has peaked. That seems to be true, in terms of share of the vote, which is down on last year’s local elections.

But does this matter? The next general election will be fought on the same system in England as pertained last Thursday.

Reform won 1,453 local authority seats, up 1,451. If that is a plateau, it is one Farage will be happy to camp out on.

Moreover, recall that the Nazi Party was installed in power by the German bourgeoisie when its vote was already declining.

Big money is moving Reform’s way and the wider far-right ecosystem of which it is the electoral expression is by no means wilting.

Or to put it differently, elections only tell part of the story — the fascist-led march in London on Saturday will tell another.

Return to Manchester a moment.

The city itself only chose a third of its councillors last Thursday — one of the three in each ward. The Greens clearly prevailed, and had the whole council been up for renewal, as in the London boroughs, the party would now be running the city council.

Nevertheless, there is no other place in England where the far right appears more assertive on the streets, more aggressive in confronting any expression of left organisation and sentiment in public. Often the far right unites with zionists and Iranian monarchists in a hell’s brew on these occasions.

That may be partial or local explanations for that. But the larger issue is that proto-fascism is not just counting heads or ballots.

And it can smell that today’s left does not nestle within a wider community-rooted workers’ movement able to defend itself.

Rather it struggles with a political recomposition of the working class, lagging a generation or more behind the social recomposition “on the ground,” a fairly usual lapse between shifting underpinning and political articulation.

The face of left politics is turned green, rather than red, last Thursday.

How socialists relate to this development is a challenge. The left sought sway in the Labour Party largely through the medium of its affiliated unions — change those basic working-class organisations and the party will follow. Such was the plan — flawed as it turned out, but by no means inherently nonsensical.

No such lever exists in relation to the Greens, a party itself in transformation. A left-Green alliance, as in Camden during the elections, could prosper, but the left has no credible national vehicle to keep up its end of any pact.

The Greens, class-focused but by no means class-rooted, are one but not the only inheritor of the fragmented legacy of Corbynism.

It is this which leaves the gap Reform drives through. It is an authoritarian, racist and Thatcherite outfit led by a phoney grifter. Still, that mix has prevailed in the US and is ascending here because it purports to offer the change working people repeatedly vote for — sometimes in negative ways — and are just as often cheated of.

So if the main battle remains on the streets, in the magnificent Palestine solidarity demonstrations above all, and in a movement that unites anti-imperialism, anti-racism and opposition to austerity, the left has skin in the Labour game.

Streeting can only prevail through some form of coup.

Should he nevertheless do so, it would represent Labour finally sealing itself in its coffin. The country would be Farage’s for the taking, unless the left generates a viable electoral alternative at, by historical standards for such developments, warp speed.

Buckle up.