Prime Minister’s Questions is usually incredibly tedious – a pantomime of performative emptiness that sucks the will to live from anyone foolish enough to watch it. But now it is a parable, taking place in real time, of whether one man can change the machine or whether the machine will change him.

Plenty of prime ministers have disliked PMQs, and some have tried to change it. Andy Burnham is the first whose trenchant of how it operates is one of the defining aspects of his premiership.

He wants to get rid of the shouty vacuousness, the party-political tub-thumping and the glib pointless insults. He wants, in his words, to replace point-scoring with problem-solving.

But it is hard for one man to take on the machine. The incentives of the Westminster system push politicians towards the worst version of themselves. They demand total victory over your opponent and provide no rewards for co-operation or consensus.

The emotional tenor of the Commons chamber is overwhelming. You can never quite understand what it’s like if you’re watching on television. The mics only pick up the voice of the person speaking and tune out the great barrage of angry insults coming from other parts of the chamber. The prime minister stands right down there at the bottom, facing a wall of human noise, a vast slab of opposition MPs jeering and laughing at them.

Whenever they stumble, they will see these braying hyenas mock them. Whenever they land a blow, they will hear a great thump of Spartan approval behind them, the troops closing ranks.

The Commons is a bear pit, a gladiatorial chamber, an architecture specifically designed to create pathological adversariality in the people who occupy it. It is almost impossible to imagine a single individual triumphing over this ancient design.

Burnham tried. To his great credit, he tried. And he had some partial success. But in the corners, in the fraying edges, you could see those grim incentives operating upon him. Only a brave man would bet on the individual triumphing over the machine.

“Can he name a single spending request to which he answered ‘no’?” Tory leader Kemi Badenoch asked. Burnham frowned. Unlike other, more recent prime ministers, he seemed totally free of his notes, speaking as if he were talking completely off the cuff. He tried, in his very first answer, to do things differently. “What I can say to the right honourable lady was I was quite clear… about the need to get the welfare bill down.” He was looking for common ground, a part of the Conservative agenda they might conceivably be able to work together on.

“He avoided my question,” Badenoch shot back. Her emotional instincts are the opposite of Burnham’s. She loves the fight. She wants the fight. The prospect of cautious co-operative policy-making would be her idea of hell. “What exactly has he cut?”

Burnham hesitated. For a moment he looked like he was genuinely lost for words. Perhaps his approach would be the death of him. Maybe his aversion to a script would prove a fatal folly. Hesitation and muddle are a death sentence in the Commons chamber.

Then a smile crept upon his face. “Tax,” he said, “is the simple answer to that question.”

It was staggeringly effective. He’d played a little emotional game, luring the other side into thinking they had him, before firing off his reply. The Labour benches loved it. You couldn’t imagine Keir Starmer having the emotional intelligence or the showmanship to pull off that little trick. Inevitably, the troops rallied behind him. A great shout of “more” rose from the government benches.

It was a moment of triumph and tragedy. The problem is not that Burnham is bad at this sort of thing. It’s that he is very good at it. And because he is good at it, Labour MPs will celebrate him for it. And if they celebrate him for it, he will have a reason to keep doing it. And before you know it, any chance of reforming this godforsaken ritual will have evaporated.

Badenoch continued to attack Burnham for his economic performance. She was like a swaggering striker who seems completely unaware that she’s left the goal completely open.

Over the weekend, Badenoch conducted a mini-reshuffle in which she replaced Mel Stride with Andrew Griffith as her shadow Chancellor. It’s a self-harming decision, because Griffith was a junior Treasury minister during the Liz Truss government and therefore shares responsibility for her disastrous mini-Budget.

It’s just too tempting a target. No politician can pass that up. No politician could be expected to.

“She took a decision at the weekend,” Burnham said, speaking slowly, in a manner that indicated a decisive blow. “She removed a shadow chancellor who said the Truss mini-Budget was a mistake and she replaced him with one who helped to write the Truss mini-Budget.”

And that really was it. There was no coming back from it. Badenoch had been undone by her own flamboyant lack of political judgement. She almost gave up. This, she told Burnham, was point-scoring, the precise thing he had pledged not to do. “He says he wants new politics,” she said. “He says he wants honesty. So why is he pretending that a junior minister wrote that Budget?”

On points, she lost. But on substance, she was right. Badenoch is a hopeless leader, with terrible ideas and a complete lack of managerial competence. But she was correct. This is the precise thing Burnham had pledged not to do.

But he couldn’t help himself. Possibly no one could. The incentives are too strong. The social pressure of victory over your opponent is too severe. And worst of all: he’s really damn good at it. Burnham’s natural, genuine human presentation makes him a far more sympathetic figure than Badenoch.

In the grand scheme of things, PMQs doesn’t really matter. It’s a sideshow, a battered front-of-house display for the far more complex systemic failures of British politics. But fixing it would provide a vivid demonstration of the kind of change Burnham wants to create.

Perhaps he might still manage it. He’s proved over the last few months that it’s best not to underestimate him. But on the evidence of his first PMQs, he will struggle to dispel the demons which make it such a depressing spectacle.