Till today, Andy Burnham has been a lucky and deft Labour leader and prime minister. But is his luck running out? Or rather, is reality catching up with him? Because he has just been hit by a fiscal juggernaut and he has been grazed by a drive-by political shooting. The fiscal or debt assault originates from the inflation stoked by Trump’s war against Iran. Fears that the oil price and inflation will be higher for longer has seen the price of government debt falling across the world, but - as has become the norm - the fall for the UK is worse than for competitor nations. And the corollary is that the interest rate the UK government pays to service £3 trillion pound of debt is rising more than elsewhere. As we speak, the interest rate for HM Treasury on borrowing for ten years - the 10 year gilt yield - is 5.22%, a rise of 0.16% just this morning. Ouch. The UK is vulnerable for familiar political reasons. Since Liz Truss’s mini budget debacle, successive chancellors have talked the talk of prudential debt stewardship, but creditors tend to pay more attention to unfunded promises to increase defence spending or make social care fit for purpose. So Andy Burnham will do his thing later today of trying to be sunny and hopeful, but if he promises anything that investors see as costing real money - like taking state control of the utilities in the way he has hinted - he’ll find interest rates moving against him even more. As for the political hit job, that’s a case of revenge served up cold by the Labour leader he assassinated, Keir Starmer. The announcement by Starmer he is standing down as MP for Holborn & St Pancras was exquisitely timed to overshadow Burnham’s big first day as PM in parliament. And it will precipitate a by-election soap opera that will distract the PM from the economic and political imperatives - such as devising a strangely absent plan to revive economic growth. If the Green leader Zack Polanski runs, the Labour candidate would not be the shoo-in that he or she would be in other circumstances. Labour would probably win, but it would be a contest that shines a light on the many fraught issues that divide the party, from whether to impose more sanctions on Israel to whether to allow more drilling in the North Sea. So although Burnham is plainly relishing the job of PM he always coveted, today for the first time perhaps he will be aware that - to rework Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben - with great power comes a lorry load of impossible choices.