Imagine a country where a politician can waltz into power without ever facing a public election.

Where a leader with no mandate, no manifesto, and no mass support can simply seize control and enforce his bleak ideology.

Imagine waking up one day to find your homeland is now under the thumb of some grifter you never voted for, barely know and don’t particularly like.

Welcome to Britain.

Yes, this once-great nation, this plucky island that long fancied itself the mother of modern democracy, is morphing into a banana republic.

This week, I and millions of others discovered we have a new prime minister that not one of us voted for. 

Send help, America! Your cousins across the ocean are laboring under the yoke of an unelected government!

His name is Andy Burnham, and on Monday he will officially become Britain’s leader, whether us Brits like it or not. 

Many, myself included, do not.

He’s been a Labor Party high-up for years, holding various ministerial positions in the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

For the past 10 years he was mayor of Manchester. 

Then — in a coup that would make Pinochet blush — he stood in a by-election in the North of England so that he could challenge useless Keir Starmer for the Labor Party’s leadership.

He won, and as a result he was crowned leader of the nation too. 

He’s been spirited into 10 Downing St. not by the ballots of the people, but on the say-so of Labor Party bigwigs.

If such a breezy seizure of power were to occur in any other country, Britain’s chattering classes would be screaming “Tyranny!”

But because they like Burnham — and distrust Joe Brit — they have no problem at all with this Very British Coup.

Please bear one fact in mind when you see Burnham gurning on your nightly news as the anchor says “Britain has a new Prime Minister…”: we did not vote for him.

And what does he stand for?

Your guess is as good as mine.

His first speech as Labor Party leader, delivered on Friday, was heavy on vibes but light to the point of emaciation on substance.

Even The Guardian — which has been fawning over Burnham like a teenage girl at a Harry Styles gig — called it “half an hour of dense rhetoric.”

Obama-style, he laid on some hope-mongering, saying he will “bring back hope.”

He aims to instill “hope in every heart.” 

Thanks, but if I wanted some dime-store therapeutic stroking, I’d tune in to Oprah.

We don’t need our political leaders to put hope in our hearts — we need them to put cops on the streets and guards at the border and oil-drillers in the North Sea.

When us little people have been granted a glimpse of “the Burnham ideology,” it has been depressing indeed. 

He seems hell-bent on appealing to the keffiyeh-wearing, pronoun-declaring insane left rather than to sensible, struggling Britons.

He recently put out a video to solemnly moan about Israel’s “crimes” in Gaza — clearly red meat for the Israelophobes of the Islamo-left.

He’s throwing our Jewish friends under the bus in a desperate effort to win back cranky Muslim voters and posh leftists who mistake hating Israel for having a personality.

Burnham seems confused on eco-lunacy issues, too. 

He says he’s open to more drilling in the oil-rich North Sea, but he also agrees with Starmer’s manifesto pledge to grant no more oil-drilling licenses.

Which is it, Andy?

Honestly, why can’t any British politician echo the searing moral clarity of Donald Trump, whose “Drill, baby, drill” mantra brilliantly elevated the material interests of working Americans over the moral pretensions of Greta-style greens?

And Burnham has nothing to say on our border crisis — on the hundreds of fighting-age men from distant, regressive lands rocking up on our shores week after week.

In fact, he says he’ll never try to “out-Reform Reform” — that is, to fall in with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which is promising to deport illegal immigrants and reassert our fundamental sovereign right to determine who may come here and who may not.

What an idiot Burnham is: Millions of working-class Brits support Reform precisely for its pro-borders position. 

In sneering at those principles, he is sneering at every decent Brit who only wants to live in a secure nation.

Burnham won’t “save Britain.” 

He has nothing of substance to say on the crazy cult of Net Zero, the marauding religion of wokeness, or the failure of government after government to repair our borders. 

Those are the issues Brits care about.

Yet our new unelected overlord couldn’t care less. 

Brendan O’Neill is chief political writer for the British online magazine spiked.