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So, it's official. Sir Keir Starmer has broken Britain.

Make no mistake the seismic result of the Gorton and Denton by-election was a verdict on this feeble prime minister and the pathetic government he notionally leads.

It's now clear, as if it wasn't already, that no one sees him in a positive light, both inside the party and out in the country, and with each passing day he limps on he brings more damage.

It is why voters in the Greater Manchester constituency elected a MP from the Green Party, the embodiment of a protest vote - a ragbag collection of radical Left fringe fruitcakes.

So it is stuttering Starmer who must shoulder all the blame for a result which, after all that has gone before, has finished him.

The petrified prime minister signed his death warrant after banning rival Andy Burnham from standing as the Labour candidate.

The result shows the two party system is now dead.

At the 2024 General Election the combined Labour-Tory vote share in Gorton and Denton was almost 60 per cent. On Thursday it was 27 per cent.

By comparison the combined vote of the Greens and Reform was almost 70 per cent.

It is now clear that pop up and populist parties on both sides of the Left-Right divide are in the driving seat.

And while Labour and its appallingly incompetent collection of ministers are responsible for alienating the voting public after 19 months of chaos, scandal, and shapeshifting, it will be the prime minister who pays the political price.

Starmer has been crushed - both literally and metaphorically - and from this there is no return. No reboot, relaunch, or reshuffle, can save his skin now.

Labour was pulverised in its own backyard, one of its safest seats, by the Greens on the Left and Reform to the Right in a categoric adjudication of this rudderless government.

And there's more to come.

On May 7 local elections are being held for 4,851 council seats across 134 of England's 317 councils, including all 32 London boroughs.

In addition all seats in both Holyrood, the Scottish Parliament, and the Senedd, the Welsh Parliament, are being contested.

It promises to be a damning and unequivocal judgement on just how much Labour - dogmatic in applying its doomed socialist agenda - is hated from the Scottish Highlands to the South Downs and everywhere in between.

After the Gorton and Denton defeat, punch drunk Starmer said: "I came into politics late in life. I came in for one purpose only, and that was to improve the lives of people who want their lives improved. I'll continue to fight for them and I will not stop fighting the extremes of politics."

But the game is up. He is a dead man walking and the trouncing prompted delight from at least one person on the Labour hard Left.

Starmer's former deputy Angela Rayner, forced to quit the Government over unpaid property taxes, said it was "time to really listen".

That's code for a lurch to the really hard Left.

Ms Rayner, whose Ashton-under-Lyne constituency neighbours Gorton and Denton, added: "Voters want the change that we promised...we have to be braver."

Starmer is certain to be skewered - and the safe money is on Rayner being the one to plunge the knife.