Only vaulting ambition takes anyone to No 10, but Andy Burnham’s ambition reaches phenomenal heights. Can he really make the biggest changes in 40 years? Can he build a new economy? The new prime minister lashes himself to the mast of those mighty aspirations, but adds in something even riskier – an end to rough sleeping, ordered immediately. That’s so highly visible everywhere that it will be a test of the extent of his power – will it reach into each dank alley and shop doorway?
He understands the immensity of the tasks ahead. “I know what to do,” he said on taking up the leadership. Indeed, he is the most experienced prime minister to enter that door in recent years. He knows the Treasury as its chief secretary, he knows the inside ways of the cabinet, he has run the NHS and Greater Manchester. He knows Whitehall and Westminster, not to their advantage. Beyond that, he knows the disgruntled mood in the everyday world outside, where incomes stagnate.
“I have a plan,” he dares to claim, making cynics and malevolents smirk because everyone knows that wars, plagues, riots, Donald Trump and unknown unknowns upset the best-laid grids in Downing Street spreadsheets. He knows this is the best of times, the crest of the wave, the rising tide of hope. So he must not waste it: on the progressive side of life, they don’t come round often.
As a reminder that the time is short and the path hard, Keir Starmer gracefully bore the gruesome farewell ritual. He rightly says he leaves the country “stronger and fairer”. He was ousted not by plotters but by a public still unrelenting in its hostility: only 28% agree he did well, against 64% who don’t. It was his triumph to attract enough votes to sweep away the party that brought Brexit destruction, wrecked the NHS, denuded councils, blocked the courts, packed the prisons, made food banks the default social security system and degraded public services.
Burnham arrives as the most liked PM in recent times: his net popularity is far higher than that enjoyed by any of Keir Starmer, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak when they arrived in office. It wasn’t long before they all tanked, as Burnham well knows. Expect an avalanche of signature policies in these first 100 days. Read the runes of his cabinet choices, after he has instructed each on precisely what he wants of them: John Healey as chancellor will be key to his plan, whatever it is, as will Ed Miliband as foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper at health and Shabana Mahmood, who remains as home secretary.
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Expect more of the audacity that he showed in standing for election in Makerfield, where Reform had just swept up every council seat. Had he lost, it would all be over for him and probably for Labour. Look at how he dares to disrespect Margaret Thatcher, blaming her for 40 years of neoliberalism, the parlous state of public utilities and sold-off council housing, causing a “concentration of more wealth and power in the hands of fewer people and fewer places”. Still in awe, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown both made a public exhibition of inviting her for tea and talk soon after entering Downing Street. That spell is broken.
Burnham may be a luckier general than Starmer: the FT reports he has an unexpected extra £16bn for capital spending. Economists pile his desk with suggested billions to be gleaned without breaching manifesto promises or frightening bond markets: one of them, Will Hutton, collects them up, declaring “the cupboard is not bare”.
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He is lucky in his adversaries. Nigel Farage makes an ass of himself fighting Count Binface in Clacton, while angrily ducking questions about vast sums of money, such as never contaminated British politics before. Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch leads her party ever-further from voters, misled by her rowdy media ideologues: the net zero climate target is backed by twice as many as oppose it, yet she thinks abandoning it is a winning ticket, banning any pro-net zero parliamentary candidates, even in the middle of a heatwave. Burnham will hold steady on manifesto pledges on this. As the public regrets Brexit, wanting closer European ties, Badenoch perversely plans to eject any “wets” who back staying in the European convention on human rights. Until her generation of Tories has departed or begged forgiveness for the Brexit disaster, her party looks destined for the wilderness.
She has reason to worry. What Badenoch dubs “airy fairy” about Burnham is a warmth and likeability she lacks. It can’t be faked. “Relatable” is a word often used about him – others are “connecting”, “clicking”, “listening” and “understanding”. He is lavish with language and mood music. I have met him over many years and he has always been a man of ideas, who has grown in stature and self-confidence with each promotion. He is good at acknowledging how far he has come without humble-bragging or inverted snobbery.
Writing my memoir about class, I asked everyone I met to tell me about a moment when their class embarrassed them, whether they had felt too posh or not posh enough. I liked his answer: at Cambridge a girl invited this working-class boy for dinner, but he turned up for lunch instead of in the evening. That’s the kind of experience that at first gave him impostor syndrome, but he seems at ease now anywhere: proud of home, place and background, he climbed the ladder without tearing up his roots. That was Keir Starmer’s honest story too, yet however often he talked of his tool-maker father, his nurse mother, his care worker sister, their pebble-dash home, some lack in warm communication stopped people seeing him that way. The PM who went to Leeds University was seen as a “sir” in a suit, while the Cambridge-educated PM Andy is Mr Relatable in a T-shirt.
The qualities that make a successful prime minister are mercurial; no manual exists. You never know until too late how firm is their backbone, how steely their resolution. Will they buckle under adversity, or be blown off-course by gales of contradictory advice – or will they know when to bend if necessary? I thought Starmer and Brown would have them: both clever, decent, serious men, but not leaders, it turned out. The public warmed to neither. No doubt the peculiar people who dare aspire to this most monstrous job never know themselves if they really have it. Do they all feel like impostors?
Listening to his words in Downing Street, we hear a good speech-maker, with a good political record and a good character who brings goodwill with him. The rest is hope.
