Wes Streeting was always meant to be their Labour prime minister. The plan, hatched by a tiny clique of rightwing faction fighters, was this: find a candidate on whom they could fake a continuation Corbynism project to win the leadership. Then kick the ladder away from the people who backed them and the promises they made. At the next general election, given the scale of the Tory majority after 2019, get Labour back in the ring with more MPs and then hand over to Streeting. The real grownups would then be in charge and the subsequent election would be secured.

But no one reckoned with Covid, Tory turmoil and the collapse of the SNP. Suddenly Keir Starmer wasn’t going to just lead Labour to a better defeat and a springboard for victory next time. Against the odds, he was going to win. Just as Jeremy Corbyn was Labour’s accidental leader in 2015, Starmer was the party’s accidental prime minister in 2024.

It was not a marriage made in heaven. Starmer and the Blairites made awkward bedfellows. Under their breath, the Blairites despised Starmer because he had aligned himself with the Corbyn project. While Streeting and Rachel Reeves stayed firmly on the outside, right up until the protracted Brexit negotiations that began in 2018, Starmer had remained loyal to the party leader, whom the Blairites loathed even more than him. But they needed Starmer as the only person who could break the grip of Corbynism precisely because he had promoted it. What the membership wanted was a professional version of Jeremy Corbyn. Starmer was the man. But it was only meant to be a temporary deal.

Having worked closely with Labour Together while it pretended to do what it said on the tin, and been courted to support the Starmer leadership bid, I reluctantly concluded early on that this project was doomed.

It was always going to unravel, and not just because of the shotgun marriage. Neither Starmer nor the Blairites had done their intellectual homework. There was no vision on why they wanted to win and how they would govern. They just arrogantly assumed that they would be good at it. Add into the mix the hyper-factionalism that enabled them to secure total control of the party once they had the patronage of the leadership, and we now have a government with no breadth, no depth and none of the constructive challenge that any administration needs to manage the complexities of the polycrisis faced in office.

The same coercive discipline the Blairites imposed on the party was deployed for the general election. But the Tory meltdown and the split vote on the right with Reform meant victory was already in the bag. They didn’t need to make the “cast iron pledges” on tax that are now coming back to haunt them. Starmer won the 2024 election by default. The project was already doomed.

Despite a 169 seat majority, Labour is finding it impossible to govern, because it has no vision of where it is taking the country and no ability to deliver on it even if it did. Because successful governments today don’t just rely on majorities at the top, but support, participation and advocacy throughout the country. A better future can only be negotiated, not imposed.

Now the vultures are circling Starmer. He is weak and getting weaker. His self-proclaimed denial of anything that could be called Starmerism means there are few if any troops to defend him because there is nothing to defend him for.

Maybe, in a sliding doors moment, the “true” path of history will out and Streeting, as it was always meant to be, will wear the crown? As they run around in pre-budget panic mode, Labour MPs need to stop and think, not just about changing the party leader but about changing the party’s whole policy and cultural direction. Nothing less will do. What economic policy will in time deliver the right kind of shared growth? How is the state to be rewired to pass power and resource down and out to the whole of the country? And how is the hyper-factionalism of the party to be ended and a positive culture of pluralism instilled that makes Labour more agile and resilient?

Labour’s crisis is not a temporary blip. It is structural and fundamental. As things stand, recovery looks unlikely and the party could follow the same fate as its counterparts in France, who went from government to the margins almost overnight.

Any potential new leader who helped get the party into this mess will not, no matter how much they “red wash” themselves, get the party out of it. Candidates who will say anything to win and mean none of it just dig a deeper hole for the left. In the absence of a shared vision and values, they’re just pumped-up personalities who will fight like cats in a sack to come out on top. There is no loyalty to each other because there is nothing to be loyal to, other than self-belief. They have all the cunning, skills and cynicism to make it to the top of the greasy pole, but none of the awareness, the boldness or the humility to lead Labour or the country to a better place.

The next few months will make or break Labour. In people such as Ed Miliband, Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham there is a combination of skills and talents that could begin to get the party out of this existential mess. But it’s going to require everyone to be very big and very brave to beat not just Reform, but the causes of Reform. If this isn’t to be Labour’s endgame then nothing less will do.