Returning to our shores after ten days abroad, I was amazed to find a full-scale political coup in progress.

Despite having no obvious qualifications for the job – and without having gone to the bother of putting himself forward in a General Election – Andy Burnham could soon snatch the keys to No10.

He will probably install his pal Ed Miliband as Chancellor. Even though he's still a member of the Cabinet, 'Red Ed' has reportedly been offering tactical advice to the 'King of the North' as he plots to replace Sir Keir Starmer.

As the successor to Rachel Reeves, Miliband would double down on the impoverishing net zero policies he has been shoving down our throats as Energy Secretary. They would break the bounds of Labour's 2024 manifesto.

Also joining Burnham's Cabinet would be Angela Rayner, who evidently feels no shame over her failure to pay a £40,000 stamp duty liability, and is itching to whack hard-pressed employers with a further raft of workers' rights.

Louise Haigh, who resigned as a senior minister in November 2024 after it emerged she had falsely told the police a decade earlier that her work mobile phone had been stolen, is also expected to take her place at Andy Burnham's side.

What a crew! Let us disregard for a moment their moral and intellectual shortcomings (perhaps excluding Red Ed, who is a clever zealot). They would all of them – Burnham, Miliband, Rayner, Haigh and their support troops – dominate the most Left-wing government in our history.

Yet their policies were not put to the British electorate in 2024. Andy has been doing his best to conceal his true intentions before this week's by-election in Makerfield but, if he wins, the mask will instantly fall.

The essence of a coup is that it is non-democratic. A group of people, usually unrepresentative and small in number, seizes power. They almost always then proceed to ruin the unfortunate country that they control.

Can anyone save us? There is one man who could, if he wanted to. The trouble is he is vain, self-serving and arrogant, besides being a political extremist. There is no point in appealing to his decency and good sense, because he has none. I speak of Rupert Lowe, leader of Restore Britain.

Most polls suggest Burnham is a short head in front of Reform UK's rather limp candidate Robert Kenyon. If nothing changes, Andy will win on Thursday. His margin of victory, though, is likely to be smaller than Restore's entire vote, which opinion polls are putting at around 8 per cent.

In other words, if Restore's candidate Rebecca Shepherd were to vanish into thin air, there's a sporting chance that Burnham might be stopped and Britain saved from an incompetent Leftist government no one voted for.

Since there's no point in appealing to Rupert Lowe's better nature, the only hope is that prospective Restore voters will wake up in time to the reality that the party they're thinking of supporting harbours some pretty nasty secrets.

Of course Restore and Reform have much in common. Both have a robust approach to bringing down immigration, particularly the illegal variety – as do the Tories under Kemi Badenoch. But Lowe's language, which he deploys to great effect on social media, is more incendiary than Nigel Farage's.

He is also close to some very suspect people. While Farage has kept his distance from far-Right rabble-rouser Tommy Robinson and has refused to let him join Reform, Lowe said over the weekend: 'If Tommy Robinson wants to join us, that's up to him'.

Elon Musk partly fell out with Farage because the leader of Reform had distanced himself from Robinson. Lowe, by contrast, hasn't offended the world's richest man by attacking the activist.

Yesterday's Mail on Sunday revealed some very dubious connections between Restore and extremist figures. A number of those campaigning in Makerfield consorted with neo-Nazis at a recent summit of white supremacists in Portugal which called for a white-only Europe.

One of them is Callum Barker, who was on the stump for Restore last week and is described as a 'hardened neo-Nazi'. Lucy White, another Restore activist, spoke at the summit and interviewed American white supremacist Jared Taylor, whom she described as 'a true pioneer, a true legend'.

Also addressing a panel at the event last month was a Restore campaigner who uses the name 'Angloid' online and has been identified as 19-year-old Lorcan Barker. All three have been pictured with Rupert Lowe.

Steve Laws, another backer of Restore who has been described as an ethnic-cleansing extremist and has advocated the mass deportation of British Jews, has just posted online about the success of the party's campaign in Makerfield.

I'm not suggesting that Lowe shares all the highly obnoxious views of these people. But surely the mere fact that he associates with them, and that his party is supported by others of a similar ilk, should make decent people planning to vote Restore think again.

The views I've cited echo those of the far-Right British National Party and its forerunner, the National Front. Only in a handful of elections over many years did either party achieve as much as 8 per cent of the vote – the level at which Restore is now polling. Most of the time they got less than 1 per cent.

Why, then, do a significant number of people contemplate supporting Restore on Thursday? Unless you believe that Makerfield boasts an unusual number of bigots and extremists – which I don't – it can only be because many are unaware of the unsavoury side of Restore.

It suits the Left, of course, to lump Reform and Restore together as being indistinguishable. They're not.

The question is where Nigel Farage's heart really lies. Last week he declared that under a Reform government foreign nationals living in social housing would be given three months to find private accommodation or face being deported.

This sounds draconian, and is also apparently at odds with his statement in September 2024 that it was 'a political impossibility to deport hundreds of thousands of people'. He was right about that.

Was he moved to change his mind because of Restore's polling success in Makerfield and Lowe's enthusiasm for deportation? It is hard to think this wasn't the case.

A much more profitable approach for Reform would be to point out the unwholesome connections Lowe's party has with some very dodgy characters. Many planning to support it don't know what they would be voting for.

I doubt Restore will present much of a threat to Reform in the long term. Lowe isn't a serious politician. He is driven by hatred of Farage. He's a multi-millionaire maverick and extremist, supported by the world's first trillionaire, who preposterously portrays himself as an enemy of the Establishment.

I'd be surprised if he stayed the course. He'll probably fizzle out. But Rupert Lowe is capable of depriving Reform of victory on Thursday, and thereby of delivering us into the hands of a government that would ruin Britain.

Yet it's still not too late to stop Andy Burnham's monstrous coup. People of Makerfield, awake!