We were promised change by Keir Starmer (remember him?) during the general election of 2024 and at least he was good to his word.
The change wasn't quite what he expected though as the Mancunian messiah had his own change in mind.
Starmer could see the Manchester missile coming 163 miles away and yet could do nothing to prevent the direct hit. If only Keir could have deployed Kemi's Britannia shield he might have stood a chance. Such was the speed and accuracy of the eviction that even Labour MP Rushanara Ali, no stranger to speedy tenant extractions herself, must have looked on in unabashed admiration.
All placards with the word "change" on them have now been securely locked away in the Downing Street bunker. Burnham had his own supply of correx boards branded with the message of "hope".
I suspect though that the hope that is seared into his heart is somewhat different to the hopes that we all have.
Burnham hopes that the public will be grateful that Starmer is no longer around. Starmer is no longer in Downing Street, no longer an MP, no longer popping up on our TVs to inflict his own style of constant daily dripping misery and to all intents just simply is no longer!
It is almost Chinese in its operation. The total removal from official records that anyone with the name Keir Starmer ever existed is complete. I suspect his former PM photograph hasn't even made the famous Downing Street staircase. I wouldn't be surprised if they were bulldozing any building he ever lived in whilst shredding his old school reports.
Burnham is brimming with more hope than any decent person could cope with. He has inherited a basket case of an economy from "he who must not be named" and Rachel Reeves (remember her?)
He is also brimming with more distractions than Derren Brown. Just like any good magician he knows the game would be up if people actually noticed what was really going on.
Most people know Burnham likes a good Greggs cheese and melt snack, he has a partiality to Twiglets and a grab bag of onion Monster Munch, and that he loves a good barm cake whilst cheering on The Toffees from the south stand.
What most people don't know though is what he is going to do to extract the country from the depths of the hole that a fleet of JCB diggers couldn't even create.
The squeamish amongst you might want to look away at this point. Andy would prefer you reached for your mobiles to watch him and his northern mucker, Steve Rotheram, appearing on Gogglebox, sipping their beers and munching on their pub snacks on the comfy Downing Street sofa.
Economist Liam Halligan best describes the appallingly bad "here and now" and the even more appallingly bad outlook in his Substack "When the facts change".
Halligan focuses on the eye watering borrowing over the last 6 months which is only made worse with the coming of every month. The borrowing of £24.5 billion last month was bad, but takes on a more shocking aspect when you learn that £11 billion of that sum is the interest we are paying on the borrowings.
Halloween will come as light relief to Chancellor John Healey compared to the briefings he receives on the current state of the British economy. Surely the PM must wonder about the screams he must hear regularly emanating from number 11.
The national debt is more than £3 trillion. The interest on that is now in excess of £120 billion. The borrowings last month were almost £2 billion more than expected. The interest on just that bit is £100 million a year.
We don't have hope in every postcode but we do have out of control debt and borrowing.
To put this runaway debt and borrowings into some form of context just think of how many new hospitals or new schools could be built. It could be spent on higher wages for our worst paid nurses and teachers, or even dare I suggest tax cuts for alarm clock Britain.
John Healey resigned from his defence job because the last government led by "he who must not be named" wouldn't stump up the necessary cash to ensure we were better defended. The interest alone on the national debt is almost twice the defence budget.
The merciless attack on pensioners' winter fuel payments would have been totally unnecessary and the spiteful death taxes on farmers and small businesses could have been junked had the government got a grip on spending and borrowing.
To make matters worse (I did warn you to look away) the Government is spending way more than it is raising in taxes, adding to the national debt every month.
The welfare budget is coming in at £333 billion. The asylum fiasco via the flotilla of small boats and the fleet of larger boats is costing £4.9 billion a year.
Unemployment in the UK is now 275,000 more than it was in July 2024. The number of people aged 16-24 who are not in education, employment or training stands at 981,000.
The number of the UK aged 16-64 who are economically inactive is 9.09 million according to the government's own official figures.
Lord Alan Milburn's description of the problem as a "whole system failure" is a disastrous analysis but even this might fall short of the brutality of the current reality.
The interest charges on UK borrowings is way higher than our neighbours in France and Germany making the misery worse. The UK is spending 3 times the share of GDP on interest than Germany and twice the share of France. Inflation rates this month in the UK now surpass that of France and Germany too.
Whilst the current occupant of number 10 north and south wallows in nostalgia about brighter times in the 1970s he might better reflect that the tax burden under Margaret Thatcher was driven down as a share of the national income to 30% whilst it stands at 37% today and is heading towards 40%.
The Centre for Policy Studies quotes the U.S. Tax Foundation's depressing findings that the UK is 30th out of 38 for tax competitiveness in OECD countries. The trajectory is also only going in one predictable direction.
Rachel Reeves thought she was being clever as she ignored the core problem whilst scurrying around to find new ways of increasing taxes. The increase in the rate and the lowering of the threshold of employers' national insurance has landed over a million bosses with a hefty £1,000+ extra tax gouge on each of their employees earning £35,000 or more.
Desperate doesn't quite do justice to describing where we find ourselves in the UK today. Covid was a disaster which made things worse, but that was a brutal unexpected one off.
The Government happily lulls itself into thinking something will turn up whilst the chancellor and Foreign Secretary are recorded swapping pub snack stories in Bangkok at the IMF annual meeting.
Don't get me wrong, it is great that "he who must not be named" is gone. The reason for his exit was nothing to do with the fact that I knew little of his pub snack fantasies or that he couldn't do a decent TikTok in a tight t-shirt, or strum a Smiths song on his Fender Telecaster.
The core reason for his speedy exit was way more tangible. The structural mess is still there, and the debt decay is being compounded by the insane abuse of the country's credit card.
Burnham's first budget will set the tone. He has to demonstrate that he gets the seriousness of the financial knuckle ride on which the British public have been taken hostage.
Burnham has a choice
He can stand up to his backbenchers who demonstrate no hint of any unease at the tsunami hitting the UK economy.
He can carry on his tinkering with loud music on buses, reversing his predecessor's increase in the bus fare cap back to £2 and lopping a massive 87p a week off electric bills.
The tipping point has been reached and it's his backbenchers who will be tipped from office if he gets the choice wrong.
The public aren't stupid and if the PM does not believe that then I suggest he grabs a bumper bag of Twiglets, pours himself a pint of beer, sits back on his cosy sofa and just watches the next chapter unfold.