@Geri I’m not sure there’s a good outcome. Starmer is a symptom of the problems of the Labour Party, not the cause, most specifically:

• A selection process that actively discourages candidates who will stand up for their values.
• A funding process (and lack of campaign finance reform) that leaves them depending on donors whose interests are directly opposed to those of the labour movement.
• A strategy based on Duverger's law, ignoring the fact that Duverger's law is complete pseudoscientific nonsense that anyone who has a basic understanding of psychology and game theory can point to obvious flaws in.
• A refusal to directly set themselves in opposition to foreign-owned media empires that are little more than propaganda peddlers (whether they are run by Murdoch, Musk, or Zuckerberg, this has been a problem since the ‘90s).

If Burnham is elected as MP and mounts a successful leadership challenge, he will need to address all of these. He will need to go on the offensive against foreign media ownership, which will likely involve a ban on Xitter, cooperating with the EU on regulating Meta, and giving the press regulator enough teeth that they can fine the Sun and friends amounts that are an existential threat to their business. This will be hard to pass with a bunch of MPs who are terrified of making an enemy of these people.

He will need to impose significant controls on campaign funding, again with a regulator that has teeth. As in, violations trigger an immediate byelection with the guilty candidate barred from standing, and party level violations have penalties that apply to all MPs of that party and include banning the party leadership from standing for any party, for extended periods. Labour will need to get their house in order to not be bitten by this.

They will then need to look at actual polling and realise that you don’t win elections by being like the far right but a bit less competent at enforcing their policies and, most importantly, he will need to convince a load of Tory-lite MPs that this is their best strategy for staying in power.

Just doing that, while also managing the day-to-day work of governing, will take most of the way to the next election, leaving little time for the country to see the benefits. This needed to start day one after the election, but Starmer and Reeves were the absolute worst people to do it.

Oh, and for the love of $DEITY never let anyone with an Oxford PPE degree anywhere near the treasury ever again.

EDIT: There’s also a danger in partial success. If the next election has a Labour Party that starts to look like a Labour Party, that could split the vote between Green and Labour and let Reform Ltd. in. A Labour Party that is obviously Tory Lite is much easier to defeat. A Labour Party that is actually a Labour Party is not worth running against (if they win, I’m happy). An intermediate state is a problem.