RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Starmer is a useless man strolling…. and Britain’s sinking quickly right into a bankrupt socialist quagmire. But there’s worse loitering within the wings

Take a look at this composite photo from The Mail on Sunday. One of this Drab Four could be our next Prime Minister, whether we like it or not.

MoS political editor Glen Owen reports that Starmer is a Dead Man Walking and Labour MPs are plotting to run a ‘stalking horse’ candidate against him.

Never mind Wes Streeting, Ginge Rayner, Ed Miliband and Shabana Mahmood. I reckon a real horse could beat Surkeir.

There’s precedent for this. Thirty-odd years ago, when the Tory Prime Minister John Major was facing a challenge from an obscure backbencher, I decided to ask readers of this column to ring in and vote for either the PM or Red Rum.

Needless to say, Red Rum romped home with more than 3,500 votes to Major’s 132. These days, I’d be astonished if Starmer managed to reach double figures. I can’t imagine many people willing to pay 38p a minute on a premium phone line to prop him up in No 10.

Less that 17 months in, this isn’t so much a car crash premiership as a full-scale motorway pile-up.

The winner of Labour’s loveless landslide is a liability both to his party and the country, which is sinking rapidly into a bankrupt socialist quagmire.

Incredibly, though, backbenchers are getting restless because the Government isn’t Left-wing enough. Thanks to a recent rule change, if 20 per cent of the Parliamentary Party want Surkeir gone they can trigger an immediate leadership election. That could see any one of the Drab Four replace him.

The fact that trigger-happy Labour MPs are happy to ape the Tories and indulge in political regicide without any thought of actually consulting the electorate demonstrates beyond doubt that Britain is no longer a functioning democracy.

That grim reality became glaringly apparent when recalcitrant Remainers in Parliament – led by Surkeir and that gurning gargoyle Bercow – moved heaven and earth in an attempt to overturn Brexit, the largest vote in British history for anything.

The late Conservative politician Lord Hailsham coined the expression ‘elective dictatorship’ to describe the way in which governments with large majorities and a firm grip on party discipline can impose their will with impunity.

Ironically, however, and despite a majority of more than 150, Starmer’s Government is constrained by backbenchers who feel no loyalty to the leadership and fiercely oppose any attempt to balance the books via even modest reductions in public spending.

Indeed, they are urging ministers to go further and faster in raising taxes on the ‘wealthy’ and splashing the cash on everything from the bloated NHS bureaucracy to benefits for the millions of workshy and ‘disabled’ claimants with pretend illnesses.

Not that their unrest is caused by any imminent danger of losing their seats. Whoever becomes Prime Minister will hang on to the bitter end. They are highly unlikely to call a General Election for another three-and-a-half years.

And that’s where any illusion of democratic consent shatters like a mirror crack’d.

Yes, Starmer won a maximum five-year term in the summer of 2024. But only one-in-five of those eligible voted Labour. In other words, 80 per cent of the electorate either voted for another party or abstained, largely through indifference or disgust at the options on offer.

Since then support for Labour has plummeted still further to just 17 per cent, according to the latest opinion polls.

One way in which this Government does fit Hailsham’s elective dictatorship description is the fact that it has absolutely no mandate whatsoever for the myriad tax rises being floated ahead of the Budget.

Rachel From Complaints’ credibility is shot to pieces and she is only being kept on as a human shield for Starmer. It’s not just her blatant dissembling over her failure to obtain a home letting licence, it’s her bungling the economy with all the dexterity of Frank Spencer attempting to assemble a particularly tricky Ikea wardrobe.

I’ll get my hammer, Betty.

The bitter truth is that the last Labour manifesto was a confection of deliberate obfuscation and downright lies. Yet increasing numbers of MPs think they have a divine right to replace Starmer with a new leader and a set of even more extreme Left-wing policies for which nobody, apart from themselves, will have voted.

In this, they are simply following the example of the Conservatives, who got into the habit of replacing inconvenient Prime Ministers whenever the mood took them.

Boris won a thumping majority, but was dumped in favour of Liz Truss, who had the shelf-life of a lettuce before being replaced by Rishi Sunak. A similar fate now awaits Surkeir, even though the alternatives are equally unappetising.

Which brings us to the Drab Four, currently all jockeying for position. Favourite among the rank-and-file, astonishingly, is Ed Miliband, whom I christened Mister Ed after the legendary TV talking horse.

Who needs a stalking horse when you’ve got a talking horse?

The idea of Miliband, who brought you the ridiculous ‘Ed Stone’ and was roundly rejected at the 2015 General Election, becoming PM as a result of an internal Labour Party coup is as outrageous as it is preposterous.

This is the swivel-eyed eco-zealot who has done as much, if not more, than Rachel From Complaints to crash the economy.

His deranged Net Zero crusade has landed us with the highest energy costs in the developed world, and has destroyed the jobs of tens of thousands of those ‘workers’ Labour claims to champion, especially in Scotland.

He’s currently carpeting farmland in Lincolnshire with Chinese-made solar panels, which are useless when the sun doesn’t shine, yet refuses to exploit the same county’s shale gas riches, which could add £112 billion to the economy, power millions of homes and businesses for years to come and create a much-needed jobs bonanza.

Another front-runner is the shameless former Deputy PM Ginge Rayner, already eyeing not just an obscenely early return to the front benches, but a tilt at the top job just a few short weeks after being forced to resign over her failure to pay the full amount of stamp duty on her new flat in Hove, Actually.

Despite posing as a tribune of traditional Labour voters in the Northen Red Wall, she couldn’t have got further away from her constituency if she had moved onto a houseboat moored in Brighton Marina.

She should have resigned as an MP, too, offered herself for re-election and let her constituents decide her future.

Then there’s the current pash of the Boys In The Bubble and the Left-wing broadcast media, Wes Streeting. As I reminded you last week, this is the charmer who wanted to push the Mail’s Jan Moir under a train because he objected to something she wrote. I wonder if in light of this weekend’s violent atrocity on a train at Huntingdon he is experiencing any mild pangs of regret?

Plus, Streeting has managed to halve his vote in Ilford North and is sitting on a majority of just 528. He’ll almost certainly lose his seat at the next election, and there is talk of him staging a ‘chicken run’ to a safer berth in 2029. But who wants a PM looking over his shoulder at survival?

Also among the runners and riders is the latest flavour of the month, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, featured recently in a 2014 video of her performing at a ‘Free, Free Palestine’ rally surrounded by the usual bunch of headbangers in their fashionable intifada headgear.

This is the same Shabana Mahmood whose first act as Justice Secretary was to empty the prisons of hardened criminals garnted early release to make room for ‘far-Right’ offenders and people who had posted hurty words on the internet.

Just as I felt that Boris should never have been ejected by the Tories without facing the electorate, so I maintain that no Prime Minister should be removed, unless incapable through illness or death.

Even then, his or her successor should seek the endorsement of voters in an immediate General Election. MPs mustn’t be permitted to get away with treating the paying public with undisguised contempt.

Surkier and his hapless Chancellor may be spectacularly unfit for office, but until the rest of us get the opportunity to vote on the matter, none of the Drab Four should ever be allowed anywhere near the keys to 10 Downing Street.