On Monday a Prime Minister no one voted for inherits the hardest change of our lives to manage. Most of us are not sure we trust him with it, and we were never asked.

Two things are true at once this week, and the country is treating them as unrelated. They are not.

The first is a question of consent. On Monday, Andy Burnham becomes Prime Minister without anyone outside his party casting a vote. A poll by Lord Ashcroft found only about a quarter of Britons, and fewer than half of Labour's own voters, think he should take the job without a contest. He takes it anyway, and by the rules he may. Gordon Brown did the same in 2007, Theresa May in 2016. This is not a crisis. It is a familiar British shrug.

The second is a question of trust, and it is the bigger one. The years ahead will ask the public to accept a wave of change to how we work, and to believe that whoever is steering it knows what they are doing. That belief is the scarcest resource in politics right now, and it is running low. People are increasingly worried about what AI will do to their livelihoods, and the worry is sharpest among the young, whose first jobs are the ones quietly not being posted.

Here is where the two meet. We are being asked to extend an unusual amount of trust, over an unusually frightening change, to a person we did not choose. And on that specific change, we have very little to go on from the man himself. The AI-and-work ideas attached to his name came from a briefing his advisers gave a newspaper, not from him. So the country is being asked to trust his judgment on the defining question of the era while having barely heard his judgment on it.

Behavioural research is clear about what governs whether people accept a hard change: not mainly whether the outcome is fair, but whether the process that produced it felt fair, and whether they had a voice in who was making it. On both counts, a leader installed without a vote starts with less in the account. Every future request, retrain, relocate, accept that the job you trained for is thinning, is a withdrawal from a balance that began low.

There is a way through, and it is not complicated. He can spend the early weeks saying honestly what he does not yet know, rather than performing a confidence he has not earned, and let candour do the work a ballot did not. The alternative, treating a coronation as a mandate and a mandate as permission to stop explaining, is how you burn trust you were already short of. Watch, from Monday, which one he chooses. On this, unlike on his policy, he has not yet shown his hand.