Tomorrow, the King of the North will grace southerners with his exulted present and travel to London to claim the throne that he considers his by right. It’s as if he has hypnotised his party to lay down their collective shawls in order that the chosen one can walk on water. It’s as if the Messiah is coming to rescue those who have proven incapable of running the country. It’s almost as if he, like Barack Obama appeared to be in 2008, considers himself the only human being in the country who can come to its rescue. He’s even using Obamaesque language, promising hope and change. Obama soon found out that governing was more difficult than that. Andy Burnham is about to discover the awful truth, that changing things in government and changing things in Whitehall are much more difficult. Having been a cabinet minister for three years under Blair and Brown, you’d think he might know that already.
I like Andy Burnham, but I’m afraid we are about to find out that our new emperor has no clothes.
One of the main complaints about Keir Starmer is that he has no grounding political ideological groundings. This means that he is very proficient at swaying in the political wind, and flip-flopping on a policy in the hope that no one will notice.
Burnham has a longer history than Starmer in the Labour Party. Indeed, he’s been a Labour activist from a young age. But can anyone identify what Burnhamism actually is or means. People point to ‘Manchesterism’ but as Sam Coates’s excellent 20 minute film points out, the ground for what Burnham has allegedly achieved in Manchester was laid by Sir Richard Leese. Burnham has been very adept in claiming the glory for himself. Running a city region the size of Manchester is very different to running a country.
Since it became clear that Burnham intended to topple the prime minister, the media has had a collective failure in scrutinising what Andy Burnham really believes in. We’ve seen plenty of examples of issues which he has u-turned on in a way that would make even Keir Starmer blush, but there is scant little evidence of anything which he believes in except himself.
In 2007, when Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair, everyone thought he would come in with an agenda for government. That he knew exactly what he wanted to do and achieve. After all, he had had ten years to think about it. But when he walked through the Number 10 door, it turned out the policy cupboard was bare. It led to three years of listless government, with a prime minister incapable of making decisions or to reflect the priorities of the people he was there to serve.
I genuinely hope I am wrong and that Burnham has some visionary policies up his sleep which he can deploy to the benefit of the nation. I am, however, sceptical, because I see no evidence of it. However, assuming he has two months to prepare to take over, perhaps there is still time to put some meat on the bone.
Theresa May became prime minister two months earlier than she might have expected, when Andrea Leadsom pulled out of the 2026 Tory leadership contest in early July 2016. I do hope history does not repeat itself. There should be a context, but if there isn’t, Keit Starmer would do his successor a favour by staying on until the beginning of September. May had no time to prepare for government, and we all know what happened to her.
There is a huge responsibility on Burnham’s shoulders. If he becomes another prime minister who overpromises and underdelivers, the electorate’s faith in politics will diminish to an even more dangerous level than it already has.
Welcome to political realism, Andy. You’ve campaigned in poetry. Now is the time to realise that, as Mario Cuoma memorably said, you have to govern in prose.
Get writing.