POLLS giving Reform its narrowest lead over Labour in months and showing Andy Burnham comfortably outpolls both Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch as preferred prime minister show Labour has a chance to dig itself out of the hole Keir Starmer leaves it in.

Only a chance, though — even if the scandal over Farage’s undeclared gifts from rich crooks has damaged Reform, it is still in the lead.

The worst possible start to a Burnham premiership would be signalling continuation of the insider-club politics that sickens the nation.

The impunity with which the powerful and well connected break the rules has been a source of simmering anger since Covid at least, with the revelations of contracts for cronies and casual breaches of lockdown conditions by the politicians imposing them on everyone else.

It’s not just a Westminster thing: public fury at the privatised water bosses paying themselves fortunes while poisoning our rivers and beaches falls into the same category.

The pervasive, and entirely accurate, sense that society is rigged in favour of an elite that is not just rich but criminal is a driver of the traditional ruling parties’ loss of legitimacy.

It reached boiling point in the scandal that proved the final nail in Starmer’s coffin: his appointment of Peter Mandelson to the embassy in Washington despite knowing of his long association with the paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, whose extensive contacts among some of the most powerful men in the world has given rise to the term “the Epstein class” to refer to our rulers in general.

Mandelson, now the subject of criminal probes, was the guiding spirit of the Labour Together faction run by his protege Morgan McSweeney, the supposed strategic genius who masterminded Starmer’s rise to power through lying about everything he stood for and managed to bag Labour fewer votes in 2024 — despite a collapsing Tory government and a tame media — than Jeremy Corbyn managed in 2019 in the face of wall-to-wall press hostility and an Establishment, from his own MPs to military and Civil Service chiefs, that closed ranks against him.

Britain’s media are now trying to rehabilitate McSweeney. As Paul Holden, author of the devastating Starmer takedown The Fraud, points out, his recent interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson featured no questions whatever about his unlawful failure to report hundreds of thousands of pounds in donations to Labour Together to the Electoral Commission.

Reports that McSweeney’s successor Josh Simons will head Burnham’s No 10 policy unit suggest this is part of a wider ruling-class project to reassemble as much of the Mandelson-McSweeney project as possible and ensure it remains the dominating influence in government.

Simons headed Labour Together when it hired private investigators to smear and intimidate journalists who had helped expose its financial misconduct, notably Holden but including the Morning Star’s Andrew Murray.

It would be the height of folly for Burnham to give Simons a political role, whether or not this was the gentlemen’s agreement that saw Simons resign his Makerfield seat to let Burnham run.

It would reinforce the “jobs for the boys” impression of government by clique and confirm that the system looks after its own, no matter how outrageous their behaviour.

It would show that the disgraced think tank is still in charge, though it has demonstrably led Labour up a blind alley.

The party is a shadow of its Corbyn-era self, lacking the membership base to effectively campaign and so starved of political talent by its control-freak selection panels that when Starmer was toast it had to find a new leader outside Parliament despite having over 400 MPs.

Its restorationist project — cleaving Labour close to the outsourcers, asset-strippers and arms dealers of the Epstein class — is the reason the party is in crisis.

Burnham can stand for change or stand by the Labour Together gang. He cannot do both.