Labour’s woes are like a slow-motion car crash – and Keir Starmer isn’t even in the driving seat | Marina Hyde

“This isn’t the beginning of the end,” one senior Labour adviser remarked yesterday. “It has gone way beyond that.” To the middle of the end? The late-middle? Forgive the attempt to ascertain the precise coordinates of where we are in the decline and fall of Keir Starmer, which feels like it’s clocking in at slightly longer than the last days of Rome (conservatively estimated at a couple of centuries). Some believe that – like the phrase “heat death of the universe” – the “end of Keir Starmer” may sound like it should be a cataclysmically white-flash event, but will actually unfold over trillions of years.

I think something else is happening. I think we’re getting to the part in the movie where the mortally wounded antagonist hisses: “My death is only the beginning.” Andy Burnham is the sequel nobody asked for. The current inadequacy is a franchise.

Anyway: yesterday. You would say Britain’s defence establishment had turned their guns on Starmer, but I think their point is that they don’t have any. Or they do have guns, but they actually need advanced drones and attack submarines. Let’s just say they have turned their lack of the right kit on Starmer, whose busted managerialist approach to absolutely anything is starting to lend a retrospective sophistication to the former Tory defence secretary Gavin Williamson’s assessment that Russia should “go away and shut up”.

The resignation of the defence secretary, John Healey, over the inadequacies of the very-long-awaited defence investment plan has driven Starmer to the brink. (This is the aforementioned brink with the extremely large surface area.) Healey was followed out of the MoD door by a couple of parliamentary private secretaries, as well as by the armed forces minister and would-be leadership cleanskin, Al Carns, who I was recently shocked to learn has claimed £36,000 for PR and comms expenses since entering parliament at the last election. Feels like a lot more, surely?

The deadliest part of the defence secretary’s resignation letter is already widely held to be his mild-mannered drive-by on not one but two Downing Street addresses. As Healey put it: “You have been unable, and the Treasury has been unwilling, to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country.” Oh dear. All of this has sparked a return to the briefing fray for “Treasury sources”, who for some reason talk exactly like a desiccated Rachel Reeves spad. One “Treasury source” spat yesterday: “Let’s be clear on what John is asking for: cuts to schools and hospitals.” Hmm. This is a somewhat simplistic take on the role of chancellor. Then again, Reeves has repeatedly caved to a party that wet its collective pants over means-testing the winter fuel allowance. So maybe this is genuinely the way she sees her choices.

“The chancellor will always do what is right and needed to keep this country safe,” droned the “Treasury source”. Again: hmm. Always is starting to feel like a hell of a long time. It’s possible I’ve simply memory-holed it on previous sightings, but this week was the first time I saw the phrase “continuity chancellor” get a formal run-out. This is the idea that Reeves is angling to stay in the key role in a putative Burnham administration. And, specifically, the idea that what would really reassure the settled and contented nation of the United Kingdom is some more continuity.

Are there any bright spots? It’s foolish to count too many chickens, but we do have to take our smiles where we can, and the extremely distinct prospect of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK losing in Makerfield on Thursday – for entirely avoidable reasons that are entirely his or his party’s fault – should at least momentarily turn the corners of the mouth up. To recap, Reform somehow still – STILL – seems not to have got the message that it has to get the hazmat gloves on and trawl through its prospective candidates’ historical social-media effluent, either deleting it or picking someone who didn’t probably vote Remain and suggest doing unsolicited things to Carol Vorderman. And so it is that it has saddled itself with fielding Rob Kenyon, because even though “talking like a normal person” is good, it’s not when the thing you say is: “I’m sexist, sorry but I am.” Or when you present on Question Time as so useless that you achieve a feat unseen anywhere else in contemporary politics: having people wish you would talk more like a politician.

The other Reform blunder means it might end up on Friday morning having lost significant votes to its right, to Restore Britain. Do remember that Restore is a party that only exists because Nigel Farage is such a turbo-diva that he couldn’t handle Rupert Lowe getting any attention or raising any questions of his strategy. Farage arranged for Lowe to be taken into the forest by a huntsman, who apparently didn’t have the heart to kill him – and so it is that Nigel’s magic mirror is now sending enraging messages from Makerfield. Not sure what you’d call this tale. Snow White Supremacist?

Back up the top of the Makerfield leaderboard, though, the king in the north is preparing to march, so perhaps it won’t be long before we hear Andy Burnham’s answer as to how to deal with defence. Is it something to do with getting in a time machine and going back to create “place-first politics” and “a new politics” and “business-friendly socialism” so that now – right now – we have enough money to pay for autonomous systems and rapidly scaling the drone fleet? If not, you suspect we are soon to learn the limits of Manchesterism.

• Marina Hyde’s new book, What a Time to be Alive!, is out in September (Guardian Faber Publishing, £20). To support the Guardian, order your signed copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist