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Labour's moment has come and gone with the electorate. There's not one leadership contender that would command significantly greater popularity with voters than Sir Keir Starmer. And he only won a landslide in 2024 because the Conservatives were so unpopular. Any Labour leader would have won against an exhausted Tory party and, now they've been tested in government, the key figures are pretty dismal.

Only desperately deluded Labour MPs believe Andy Burnham, so-called King of the North, would make any difference. Even Burnham himself recognises he's got an enormous hurdle to leap just to become an MP in a northern working class constituency that has already fallen out of love with Labour.

It's for that reason he's U-turned on his pro-EU agenda, shoving it into the distant future, just as chief rival Wes Streeting is cheekily trumpeting it now in order to steal a march on him among Labour's Remainer MPs. And this is the depressing reality of the situation. The parliamentary MPs' tail is very much wagging the Labour leadership dog.

All the likely contenders are sucking up to lefty Labour MPs in order to win their support to oust Starmer. None of them are going to address the fundamental problems besetting our country for fear of alienating left-wing support. None of them are going to reduce the sky-high benefits bill. None of them are going to curtail the extravagance of the public sector with 263 senior civil servants enjoying six-figure sums in retirement.

None of them are going to bring down artificially inflated net zero energy costs that are crippling industry and destroying jobs. None of them are going to reduce the record tax burden that the IMF warned this week is hindering growth - the vital economic growth needed to pay for all of the above.

If Starmer couldn't make headway on any of these issues with his enormous parliamentary majority, forced into U-turn after U-turn, then the next leader lurching even further to the left is hardly going to make a dent in it. Which is why international markets are already pricing in the cost of this spendthrift government, forcing borrowing costs even higher. Interest payments on public sector debt having burst through the £100billion mark last year.

Furthermore, Wes Streeting and Ed Miliband have even less charisma than Starmer. Angela Rayner is the only potential populist among them, with a Trumpian ability to use insults to define her position as the peoples' champion. Yet her handling of financial issues has been dented by her own muddled tax payments.

Andy Burnham is supposed to be the most competent of them because of his position as mayor of Manchester. But Burnham's record needs to be examined more closely - he wasted £100million in taxpayers' money trying to enforce a clean air zone in his city that proved immensely unpopular and was eventually dropped. Manchester City Council is now among the most indebted local authorities in the country, facing liabilities of some £1.6billion.

None of the contenders have truly woken up to the reality of shifting voting patterns among working people. This month's local elections made it clear that Reform's simple appeal to patriotism and common sense is cutting through traditional support for both Labour and Conservatives. Neither Labour nor the Tories have got to grips with the sheer unfairness of illegal migrants costing British taxpayers' billions in benefit payments. None of them have got to grips with the imported crime wave that comes with undocumented young men flooding into the country. Unwilling even to talk about these issues reveals how far adrift the Labour leadership contenders are.

With Labour proving to be the party of spongers and shirkers, it's no surprise that ordinary hard-working Britons see little value in voting for them. In their eyes, none of the leadership candidates are offering any alternative to the decline of our country.

It doesn't matter who replaces Starmer, all of them are living in a world of make believe where they hope that just another round of tax hikes will deliver them from national bankruptcy. What a dismal, deluded bunch they all are.

Let's hope Nigel Farage's Reform can deliver a knock-out blow to Burnham in the Makerfield by-election so we don't have to endure the unedifying spectacle of lame ducks parading before loony left-wingers to win their votes.

Ordinary Britons, moving at a faster pace in their appreciation of what is going wrong in this country, deserve a new general election.