How we used to chuckle with such a superior smirk at Italy’s chaotic politics, as governments changed with such rapidity it was barely worthwhile learning the latest Italian prime minister’s name.

Almost 70 different administrations and 30 prime ministers in the 80-odd years of Italian democracy since the end of the Second World War — an average of roughly one new government every 13 months. What a joke! Well, we’re not laughing now. That cackle you can still hear is emanating from Rome.

Andy Burnham will be our seventh prime minister in 10 years, perhaps as soon as the middle of next month. Italy has only managed five PMs in the same period.

The current incumbent, Giorgia Meloni, whose feisty verbal assault on Donald Trump was the talk of last week’s G7 summit, has been in office since October 2022, during which we’ve gone through three PMs - and about to experience our fourth.

No recent British PM has been in power for as long as Meloni. It will be her fourth anniversary this autumn. Boris Johnson and Theresa May managed just over three years, Keir Starmer two years, Rishi Sunak 20 months and Liz Truss a derisory and disastrous 49 days.

You need to go back to David Cameron to find a British PM in power for longer than Meloni. Britain is now Europe’s poster child for political upheaval. We make Italy look like a beacon of stability in contrast.

Why has it come to this? For most of my life British politics was a by-word for stability: our two-party system and first-past-the-post voting usually delivered strong government with clear majorities. But our politics is now fractured by a multi-party system and that alone makes for greater instability.

Governments can now be assailed simultaneously by the populist Left and Right and while Starmer was sitting on a landslide majority, he could not ignore the rise of parties such as Reform and the Greens.

Reform won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election in May last year and the Greens took the Gorton and Denton constituency in February.

However, these were mere curtain-raisers to the main event: the May local elections. A catastrophic performance in England saw Labour lose 1,460 council seats, including 450 in London.

It fared even worse in Wales, where a party that had dominated the Welsh parliament since the start of devolution in 1999, ended up with just nine of the 96 Members of the Senedd.

And in Scotland, Labour finished a distant second to the SNP on 17 seats - tied with Reform.

So devastatingly bad were these results that they sparked the leadership challenges to Starmer that culminated in yesterday’s resignation.

Meanwhile, there has been a decade-long tendency to hand over the keys of 10 Downing Street to people simply not up to the job.

Truss, obviously. But also May, Johnson and Starmer. They were all quickly out of their depth, lacking the vision, experience and political skills to make a success of the toughest job in the country. They ran out of steam or purpose - and, sooner rather than later, were despatched to the knacker’s yard.

This had built instability into our previously stable system. The Brexit referendum made it worse. Whether you voted to leave or remain in the European Union, it’s hard to contest that Brexit knocked the stuffing out of British politics.

That three-year period in the aftermath of the referendum under the hapless May was the most debilitating time in British politics I can recall.

The Brexiteers were at loss with what to do with their victory and squabbled among themselves. The Remainers proved to be very bad losers and tried to undermine the referendum result with an enthusiasm they’d never shown during the referendum campaign.

And there was May, aimless, floundering, making things worse at every turn, including calling an unnecessary election in which she lost her working majority.

Brexit ushered in a new era of political instability which remains with us to this day. It left politicians on both sides of the debate exhausted, incapable of concentrating on anything else.

And just when it looked possible to pull out of this slough of despond in the aftermath of Johnson’s ‘Get Brexit Done’ election victory in late 2019, we were hit in quick succession by the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, major crises which served to underline how second-rate our politicians had become.

But it’s not just the lack of quality among our political leaders. Politics itself has become narrower, more inward looking.

The great political divide used to be about the big economic issues of the day: growth, wages, wealth, inequality, tax and spend. Matters that affected just about everybody.

Today, it’s more likely to be about wokery, issues of culture, gender, race and identity - matters peripheral to most folks’ lives.

So much public spending is now on auto-pilot, hermetically sealed by powerful interest groups that politicians are afraid to challenge or unable to touch.

Add together spending on welfare, health, state pensions, defence, interest on the national debt and various other untouchable parts of the government’s £1.4trillion annual budget and you’ve covered around 70 per cent of government spending, which is barely up for debate.

All parties boast about spending more on the NHS. Labour won’t touch the welfare budget. The Tories regard the pension triple lock as sacrosanct. Both are playing to their bases.

Meanwhile, the defence budget can’t be cut in the current climate and debt interest is out of politicians’ hands

Arguments take place over various bits of the remaining 30 per cent of public spending. But very little can be done in these areas that would be transformative.

The consensus protecting our vast entitlement state inhibits radical reform. The fiscal rules say only borrow to invest. In practice, we borrow tens of billions to finance current consumption in the form of pensions, welfare, social care and the NHS, depriving ourselves of the necessary investment to transform our economic circumstances.

As a result, politicians are always going to let us down, as Starmer is the latest to illustrate. The kind of radical reform which transformed Britain under Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair is now impossible.

We are too busy stuffing our pockets with current spending to invest in the future, too busy arguing over small differences and boasting about marginal matters, from school breakfast clubs to social media bans, which do nothing to secure our place as a prosperous, powerful, thriving democracy in the 21st century.

A politics programmed like this is destined to disappoint, which is the fundamental reason we now have old-style Italian instability.

You cannot transform a nation in decline by concentrating on the marginal and the insignificant. It is not clear what will change this.

Andy Burnham looks set to be our next prime minister in three weeks’ time. He will move into 10 Downing Street without a leadership contest, without an electoral mandate from the country, without a team of the best and the brightest, without credible policies to tackle our myriad problems - and without giving a moment’s thought to what really ails us.

Instead, having caused this latest bout of political instability, he will fall back on the old-time religion of more tax, more borrowing, more spending, with nary a word about wealth creation.

Far from being part of the solution, it’s much more likely he’s just another part of the problem that causes our current instability. No wonder they’re still laughing in Rome.