The Prime Minister is dead, long live the Prime Minister! It will take the UK two months to replace the resigning Starmer with Andy Burnham, 56, the long-serving mayor of Greater Manchester, a ‘man of the North’ and therefore feared by the City, but also a politician who has worked with three very different Labour leaders: Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Jeremy Corbyn, and who is suspected of being a smooth talker but remains a ‘chameleon’. However, the crisis runs deeper, caused by the hubris that led to the break with the European Union 10 years ago, by the rise in racist unrest, and by the uncertainty surrounding foreign policy.

I realised that Keir Starmer was finished – despite having 414 seats in Westminster – when I saw him throw himself at Trump’s feet to pick up the sheets of paper, smudged with his signature, that had fallen to the floor. If London intended to break the ‘special partnership’ with Washington – and with Trump in power there was no alternative – the Prime Minister should have emphasised the gravity of the situation, called a spade a spade, not prostrated himself. Trump then told him, “You’re no Churchill.” He failed to retort: “And you’re not worth one of Roosevelt’s injured legs.” He had made empty promises to tax the super-rich at 5 per cent to fund the health service. Not to sell weapons to those who use them for criminal purposes. Instead, he passed a law prohibiting criticism of Israel. And he ran after Farage and Robinson, once saying: ‘We risk becoming an island of migrants’.”

To return as an MP, and thus stand for election as Prime Minister, Burnham swept aside Farage’s Reform UK and Restore Britain – which supports the death penalty – in June. Voter turnout in the constituency was on the rise: 58.6 per cent. He secured a comfortable majority: 54 per cent of the vote. But it will not be easy for Burnham to escape the curse of Brexit, which has already brought down six prime ministers. He will need to explain to the English countryside that the Empire will not return and that the future lies in Europe. The fishermen who blamed the EU and can no longer sell their catch know this all too well. Then there are the racist outbursts. They spring from pubs fuelled by resentment over lost jobs and dignity. Those white voters will have to be told that the problem lies with them – that, when drunk, they beat their wives and children and seek a scapegoat. The Empire ‘solved’ the problem by forcibly packing them into galleys. It is better to accept, without shame, a welfare benefit, psychological support from a counsellor, or to go back to school. And there is no point in shouting, like Corbyn, ‘jobs, jobs’. People know that the old jobs won’t come back. That the future depends on investment in research, ecology, artificial intelligence and international alliances. Finally – but no less important to me – Europe, including London and Edinburgh, will come into its own if it can clearly acknowledge the wrongs committed by colonialism and imperialism. Therefore, condemnation of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism must go hand in hand with sanctions against Israel for its colonialism, its blasphemous use of religion, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

It’s a vast programme, I know. And not at all intuitive. If you’ve read the ‘Bignami’ summaries of Marxism, anti-imperialism and Third Worldism, you’ll find easier – and more misleading – answers. But this is the reality. To bring an end to a war unlike any seen before (against Iran) and one that has clearly failed, the so-called West has left Trump to his insomnia and his games with wrestlers at the White House or amongst the mirrors of the palace-prison of Versailles. Vance is handing over money and respectability to the Revolutionary Guards, and indeed to Hezbollah, in exchange for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. After insulting us for months, the President and the Israeli ambassador are now explaining to us Italians that we have misunderstood. And that, once Hamas and Hezbollah have been disarmed, they would renounce massacres (of children and journalists) and deportations. The wheel turns. Soon the burden of government will once again fall on those who are guilty of many things, but not of having trampled on the law that prohibits, even in war, the killing of innocents, nurses and journalists. So we must prepare ourselves. I have seen that even Conte has called, on Tg3, for a common defence for Europe. I see that there are fewer people who believe Putin is winning. Or that relations with the US will return to how they were in the twentieth century. So we’ll be able to rail against imperialism, whilst remaining in NATO’s shadow.