Not another one! Not another ex-UK prime minister about to join the international speaking circuit.

At any given moment there are about eight of us former UK PMs in a holding pattern above New York or Miami or Mumbai, waiting to favour vast conventions of gastroenterologists and cryptozoologists with our scintillating apercus.

The market for former UK prime ministers is, frankly, already saturated.

I think I speak for the rest of this elite trades union – John, Tony, Gordon, Dave, Theresa, Liz, Rishi – when I say that we didn’t expect another member for years.

Now, incredibly, it looks as though the skids are under Keir; in fact, he is skidding so fast that he is set to join us all by November, in the lengthening line of ex-UK PMs in the back row at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday.

Today’s betting markets are giving odds of six to one that some time this year the world’s speaking agencies will be touting Starmer as the ideal man to open a property forum in Kazakhstan or a dental surgery in Denver.

Well, if that is indeed the case, what is he going to say? What is his schtick? Starmer – the man, the myth, the legend?

It’s all right, Keir: I’ve got the answer for you. I’ll save you the work. All you need to do is tell them how you took an impregnable political position and transformed it into an absolute Horlicks.

You tell them how you are the reverse Midas, who turns gold into dross; the anti-Houdini, who manages to tie himself into inextricable knots; the Gerald Ratner of politics, who is somehow trashing the entire Labour brand.

Look, we all make mistakes, in our various ways, Keir, but it takes a certain genius to blow it so soon, and on such an epic scale.

It is less than two years since you won a huge 173-seat majority, but much more important you have the advantage of Labour party rules that should make it all but impossible to challenge you or remove you while in office.

In all the 126-year history of the Labour party, no such assassination has ever taken place. That is in stark contrast to the Tory party, of course, whose crazy rules encourage Tory MPs to remove their leaders with Aztec regularity. When the herd moves, it moves, as I think I once said of my fellow Tory MPs.

But now the infection seems to have been passed on to Labour MPs, like some terrifying spongiform encephalopathy.

Across the world, people are looking at Westminster – Mother of Parliaments – and saying, what the hell is happening to Britain? It’s worse than Italy in the 1970s.

The pound weakens amid the chaos, and the markets dump UK gilts. In the universities of Beijing, communist party lecturers smugly point to the chronic instability of democratic government.

And what is it all about? What are these Labour MPs trying to do?

You look at these characters touting themselves as Starmer’s replacement and you wonder whether the betting markets can really be right.

None of the candidates has a clear route to power, and none of them would be any better – in fact, most of them would be a darn sight worse.

There’s that nice young Wes Streeting, the articulate chap in the powder-blue suit who has just resigned as Health Secretary. Now what, Wes?

Contrary to predictions over the weekend, he has not launched a leadership challenge. He claims he wants a ‘battle of ideas’, when in reality it is obvious that he doesn’t have the numbers. As Labour’s rule-drafters wisely foresaw, it is quite a job to find 81 backers for a single candidate, and he has so far failed.

Then there is Angela Rayner, for whom I admit I have a soft spot.

She is, in person, amusing and kind, and I am not even inclined to be censorious about the way she refers to me and my party as ‘Tory scum’. It’s what Lefties do. It’s how they think. But ginger Ange has just been forced to cough up £40,000 in mysteriously unpaid stamp duty, at a time when – as Deputy Prime Minister – she encouraged taxes to rise to their highest level in history.

Are the put-upon people of this country going to vote for a tax‑dodger? I doubt it.

Then there is Ed Miliband, who has done more than anyone else to jack up the costs of UK energy, so that British industry is desperately and unnecessarily handicapped. Are we really going back to Miliband?

This is a man who not only lost decisively in a struggle with David Cameron, but also with a bacon sandwich. Why is he suddenly the revolutionary solution to the nation’s ills?

Oh no, wait: he is just the John the Baptist. He’s making straight the path of the real soft Left Messiah, the seemingly mascara’d Mancunian mayor Andy Burnham, who is now apparently poised to sweep to victory, and oust Starmer, after being offered Makerfield as his route back to parliament.

Even if the good people of Makerfield are willing to serve as human trampolines for his ambition, is he, in fact, nailed on to win the leadership? If you look at his record, it turns out he has lost twice – once to Starmer himself.

None of these people seem able to address the fundamental problem, which is that Labour has become the party of affluent metropolitan university-educated socialists, who have become increasingly detached from – if not hostile towards – the hopes, dreams and patriotic feeling of most people in this country.

With the possible (though frankly unproven) exception of Wes Streeting, the candidates all think the answer to the nation’s ills is more state interference, more tax, more spending, and more welfare.

None of them has opposed Starmer’s appalling economic policies, his disastrous educational policies, his bullying and over-taxing of farmers and pubs and businesses of all kinds.

None of them seems to regret the flight of thousands of talented people from the UK – on the contrary, they seem to relish the purge.

In fact, this Labour ‘battle of ideas’ contains no new ideas whatever, except of course the perennial favourite of re-subjugating this country to rule from Brussels – a completely disastrous move that would mean, apart from anything else, giving up control of our borders.

Whichever of these clowns takes over from Starmer, he or she will be leading a government manifestly different from the one that presented itself to the people at the election in 2024. It will be a fraud on the voters. It will be completely undemocratic, and the voters will notice.

The popular demand to be consulted will be uncontainable, especially if – as seems likely - things go badly.

If they do indeed defenestrate Starmer – and it still seems somehow incredible – then the one good piece of news is that the chances of an early election are greatly increased.

Both insurgent parties have sudden problems. The Green fellow didn’t pay his council tax, and, more significantly, the leader of Reform has to justify a £5 million undeclared personal bung. That’s a lot of money to conceal.

Now is the time, while the odds are decent, to put a bet on Badenoch to be next PM.