After a day when a great deal happened in Labour Party politics, and at the same time nothing very much happened at all, I have little choice but to talk about this topic.

Let's summarise the situation. Keir Starmer was the Prime Minister in the morning. Keir Starmer was the Prime Minister in the evening.

At lunchtime, Wes Streeting resigned as health secretary but did not mount a leadership challenge. I am quite sure that was for two very good reasons.

The first is that he does not have the support required from Labour MPs to start a leadership challenge.

The second is that he has, like everyone else, read the opinion polls on this issue, which I shared here yesterday, which show that he has almost no chance of winning a Labour leadership election and, as a consequence, resigned to save face but did not start a leadership challenge because he knows there is no way on earth that he could win it.

In that sense, yesterday resolved a question. Streeting is not going to be the next leader of Labour.

Then, in the late afternoon, Josh Simons MP, one of the most unsavoury people, in my opinion, to have become a Labour MP in recent years, resigned his Makerfield seat in Manchester to provide Andy Burnham with a chance of standing to win that seat in a by-election, opening the route for Burnham to become Labour leader if he could then successfully raise a challenge to Keir Starmer.

There are, it should be pointed out, an enormous number of conditional factors implicit in this process.

First, Labour has to let Andy Burnham stand, and they did not earlier this year, and may not do so now, although Starmer has apparently changed his mind and will let him run.

Second, Burnham has to win the by-election, and there is absolutely no guarantee that he will do so. He might have won in every single ward in the constituency in the last election in which he stood for mayor of Manchester, but the simple fact is that, in the recent council by-elections, every single ward in the seat voted Reform on a first-past-the-post basis. What is more, the Labour majority in the seat has been going down for decades. Makerfield was once a safe Labour seat, but now looks to be decidedly marginal. Whether Labour can win here now is very uncertain, and any serious vote for the Greens would seriously upset Andy Burnham's chances, and that vote is a possibility given the recent result in Gorton and Denton, also in Manchester. There is, then, no straight route back to Parliament.

But, presuming that Burnham could get to Parliament, he would still need the support of 81 Labour MPs. He appears very confident of that. Then, and only then, it seems, could he stand for the Labour leadership. Starmer says he will also stand in any such election, and I think it would be most unwise to rule out the possibility that someone else would as well.

Given how impossible the situation for Wes Streeting is now, there are only two such choices. The first is Angela Rayner, but she appears to be a much diminished person as a consequence of her problems over stamp duty and subsequent resignation as a minister and deputy Prime Minister. I cannot see people rallying around her.

What I do not rule out is a run from Ed Miliband. Why? Because Andy Burnham is undoubtedly from the right of the Labour Party, although people like to call him soft left, and his track record is not good, nor are the current associations that are letting him stand.

He voted for the Iraq war way back in the Blair era. As health secretary in 2009, he was involved in NHS privatisation, which is not a good sign, nd the fact that Josh Simons has resigned for him does not look good.

Josh Simons ran Labour Together before entering parliament. This entity was, of course, closely associated with the rise of Morgan McSweeeney and was fined by the Electoral Commission for fundraising activities that it did not declare during his era. Simons appears to have been his chosen successor, and whilst he ran it, the organisation ran investigations into campaigns against left-wing journalists criticising the Labour Party, whilst Simons is closely associated with Labour Friends of Israel. He is, then, incredibly close to the Mandelson / McSweeney project, of which his resignation just feels another part.

That then suggests that Andy Burnham is nothing more than a continuity candidate, and a straight replacement for Starmer.

Certainly, when he stood for leader in 2015, he said and did nothing to make him stand out from the bland opponents of Corbyn at that time.  His policies, his economics, and his offerings were all truly neoliberal to their very core. He was deeply critical of the economic ideas of mine that Corbyn used to help him secure his win.

Would Miliband stand against Burham then? I genuinely don't know, but my point is a very clear one. If he doesn't, I doubt that anybody from the left (if we can still describe Ed Miliband as being on the left of the party) might do so, and this leadership contest will do nothing to save the party, its election prospects, or prevent its demise.

And all of this speculation assumes that Burnham can beat Reform now. If he can't, Miliband might get a run, and he is certainly a better prospect than Burnham, but the scale of the challenge from Reform would then be known and be decidedly sobering, at least as far as Labour is concerned, because in that case, everyone would know that voting for Labour would be no way to beat Reform.

We are set for a few interesting weeks of politics. What we are not set to get are answers to any real questions, or an understanding of where politics might be going beyond the fact that it looks like Labour remains in its death throes and has no way to shake them off.

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