It’s a tale of lame ducks and lemmings. Just two years after he won them a landslide majority, Keir Starmer is apparently on his way out as Labour leader and Prime Minister.

Andy Burnham, the newly-elected MP for Makerfield, is gunning for his job. The former Manchester mayor has yet to offer a critique of Starmer’s record or outline his alternative programme.

Yet, if the polling is accurate, the Labour rank and file are willing — champing at the bit, quite frankly — to put him in Number 10 purely on the strength of vibes.

It seems almost churlish to observe that these self-same party members chose Starmer in 2020 also on the strength of vibes, in that case vague, leftish soundbites designed to make the ex-barrister sound more progressive than he was.

Having followed one ambitious chancer off a cliff, Labour members are bearing Andy Burnham on their shoulders and sprinting towards another precipice.

But Labour is not the only governing party that has grown restless. John Swinney’s grip on the SNP is in doubt following the Aberdeen South by-election. Heroic attempts have been made to downplay the result, which saw Douglas Lumsden capture the seat from the Nationalists with a campaign focused on oil and gas jobs.

It was the first Scottish Tory gain in a Commons by-election since Glasgow Pollok in 1967. That is so long ago that Swinney was just two years old when it happened. No wonder he wants to dismiss its significance, but the best he could do was to blame ‘tactical voting’.

Sure, John, but it was you they were tactically voting against.

One man laughing all the way to Bute House over the result is Stephen Flynn. On Friday morning, with the scale of the SNP’s defeat established, he tutted on Twitter about ‘a tough night in Aberdeen that some will need to reflect on, quite heavily’.

Perhaps Flynn should lead the way since he was the cause of the whole debacle. He prompted the by-election when he decided to quit Westminster for the greener pastures of Holyrood. In doing so, he left his colleague Richard Thomson to defend a vote share of less than one-third.

Flynn misplaced 12.5 per cent of the SNP’s vote in 2024 but it was Thomson’s 4.2 per cent drop that warranted reflection. Flynn went along with his party’s Janus-faced strategy on oil and gas, telling North Sea workers he would battle for their jobs while keeping faith with the Net Zero dogma putting them on the dole. If chutzpah were a fossil fuel, Stephen Flynn would be a one-man Jackdaw.

That’s not to say that Flynn doesn’t believe in anything. He believes passionately that he should be First Minister and that John Swinney shouldn’t. The same can be said of Andy Burnham. He keeps talking about the importance of ‘change’ though the only change he seems to have in mind is the name of the Labour Party’s leader.

There are those in the SNP who say Flynn can move the dial on independence, but how exactly? What does he know that Nicola Sturgeon, Humza Yousaf and Swinney didn’t know?

Yes, demographics are becoming more promising by the day, but when the tipping point comes, and polls consistently show a majority for leaving the UK, a referendum will still be in Westminster’s gift.

What would Flynn do differently? Organise some marches? Lean into a spot of civil disobedience? Go down the UDI route?

Similarly, Burnham’s boosters claim he is better-placed to lead a Labour government than Starmer, but beyond questions of judgment and personality Starmer’s difficulty has been the gap between what he promised in opposition and what he’s been able to deliver in government.

That is largely a matter of resources, or rather the lack of them. Labour cannot spend its way to popularity because there isn’t enough money and it is unwilling to raise revenue by cutting spending elsewhere or hiking the basic rate of income tax. Once in Number 10, Burnham would be confronted by the same fiscal realities and crippled by the same aversion to difficult decisions. He would be as unpopular as Starmer in short order.

Flynn and Burnham are both graduates of Mr Micawber’s School of Government: something will turn up.

None of this should be mistaken for a defence of Starmer or Swinney. Both are duds. Starmer is an unconvincing human impersonator with the personality of a speed camera and the nasal whine of a Waitrose self-service checkout.

Had he been preceded by anyone other than Jeremy Corbyn, he would never have become Labour leader.

Swinney considers himself a political giant, and while it doesn’t take much to tower above Scottish politics, he is nonetheless a philosophical pigmy. He has no vision, no ideas and no inspiration. There is more originality in the writers’ room of a BBC Scotland comedy series.

Swinney is First Minister because Humza Yousaf’s premiership crashed harder than his knee scooter and the party’s unhinged membership refused to elect Kate Forbes as SNP leader on account of her believing that women exist.

But just because Starmer and Swinney are insubstantial, it does not follow that their aspiring replacements would mark an improvement. Maybe a brief lift in the polls but both Burnham and Flynn would eventually be found out.

They are insubstantial, too, but they hide it behind the same insincere, I’m-a-normal-fella-I-am schtick, a pretence of everyday blokedom — football! pies! pints! — from career politicians who subscribe to all the fashionable nostrums of the lanyard classes that actual everyday blokes despise.

Why must the country be put through this? I’m very sorry that Labour and the SNP find themselves adrift and directionless in government, unable to achieve much of substance, and wracked by internal psychodramas, but couldn’t they just bottle it all up and get on with governing?

It’s not as if Scotland and the rest of the country are without definitional challenges, whether on economic growth, immigration, or national security.

There is an urgent need for leaders equal to these matters and while Keir Starmer and John Swinney are plainly not men for hard times, they are hardly all that much worse than the flimsy, narcissistic, and unimpressive Andy Burnham and Stephen Flynn.

This is a result of the degradation of Britain’s political class. Anyone with wit, intelligence, character or colour was drummed out long ago and supplanted by a coalition of the bland, the mediocre, the humourless and the incurious.

Most MPs and MSPs could be replaced by a chatbot with noticeable improvements in spontaneity and authenticity.

Whether it’s Starmer and Burnham doing battle or Flynn toppling Swinney, it’s just another changing of the guard among a dull, inept and self-serving political class.

We face the prospect of yesterday’s men being replaced with hollow men, men of no obvious talent or insight but with just enough ambition to overcome it.

And we know, because we have been here before, that whether things change or stay the same the one thing they won’t get is any better.

We have resigned ourselves to being governed by men with more ambition than ability, with ideology but not ideas. Not leaders of a nation but managers of a nation’s terminal decline. We surely deserve better.