For heartily relieved Labour MPs queueing up to nominate a new Labour leader, Andy Burnham is their Jude Bellingham. He shoots, and it’s “third time lucky”, as he remarked with his laconic edge of his previous failed attempts to lead the party.
But can he score on a political pitch which bears the scars of indecision and bewilderment about what went so awry in the Starmer premiership? Among the genuine sense of buzz, optimism and sheer relief in many Labour quarters, a “quartet” of tensions will flare up quickly. They will require clearer direction than the fuzzy contours of Burnhamism today.
The first is the next PM’s “Manchesterism” vision of leadership. For one thing, it needs to shake off its North West-first moniker. “Everyone’s thrilled that a southern-centric Downing Street will take the North seriously,” a North-East MP tells me, “But there are the Pennines to consider and the sense that the east of the country could come off short.”
The outsourcing of some Treasury functions to “Treasury North” in Darlington is not highly regarded among decision makers. As the Treasury Permanent Secretary Lord Nick Macpherson, puts it: “Machinery of government changes like this are very disruptive and the new PM only has three years in which to make a difference.”
That is a telling example of the “on paper it works” version of Burnhamism, of the kind espoused by Miatta Fahnbulleh, the Peckham MP and his most influential left-leaning economic influence. Creating an alternative economics of the left, fired by more state activism and moving away from financial services dominance, has been a long-held progressive goal.
But Burnham will be judged mercilessly on how rapid his government’s impact is. He needs to focus on the difficult tasks of delivery and job creation amid AI and labour shortages. That reality check will bite as soon as his first Budget forces him to focus on some priorities and let others wither.
But devolution is also hard yard and Labour has a tendency to throw out far more policy ideas than it is able to deliver. Handing power to local and regional leaders also means more risks than is readily admitted.
And in the meantime, as Lord O’Neill, the most markets-hardened member of Burnham’s close advisory folk pointed out in an interview with me last week, the world keeps turning, and big questions arise about how to deal with trade opportunities and threats. The “soft left” also has a tin ear when it comes to the perception that Labour has been indifferent or hostile to wealthy investors. That is not something that Burnham can farm out. One weakness of Starmer’s he must not repeat is being missing in action when it comes to co-leading the economic argument.
We do not yet know if Ed Miliband will move into No 11 as the candidate with deepest experience of the Treasury and departmental leadership, or whether Burnham will go for a centre-right appointment in Shabana Mahmood, or indeed something in the middle with Yvette Cooper.
But that is part of the Burnham quartet of issues also. What is the balance between the “retro” feel of his first moves, and roles which feel that they stand for something new? Burnham knows he needs experience around him, hence James Purnell as a wily and experienced Chief of Staff, and a flirtation with David Miliband returning to the Foreign Office. At the same time, he has a promise to keep to the likes of Angela Rayner and Louise Haigh, whose idea of being “bold” in power is not simply a revivalist movement from the early 2000s.
All of this reminds us how fuzzy the contours of Burnhamism are. David Miliband evinced support in a speech on Thursday for an electoral reform that flopped in a referendum in 2011. Is this still the preferred option and a serious push to change the electoral system to a form of proportional representation which benefits Labour? Quite likely it is, but what looks like out-riding now (or indeed a job-clinching audition by Miliband) will come under more scrutiny.
Thirdly, Burnham himself has turned up the heat – largely on himself – by leaning hard into a critique that Starmer “didn’t get it right on Gaza”, meaning that he sounded too indifferent to the humanitarian disasters unfolding in the Strip when Israel launched its war on Hamas.
The solutions are not straightforward. Advocating louder recognition of a Palestinian state is nowhere near to producing an outcome. At the same time, the intervention annoyed some Jewish groups, who feel it downplayed the seriousness of the threat to Israel from Iran and its proxies. It is a lot clearer what Burnham does not want in this regard than what he does.
The new creed of Burnhamism is avowedly pro-European, but has yet to engage with how moving further away from the US would actually play out in losing tariff relief advantages. Starmer, for all his shortcomings, was pretty good at securing these pledges to protect British jobs as far as possible – they rescued a battered UK brand, Jaguar Land Rover from imminent collapse. Any sense that No 10 is seeking more distance from the US will inevitably endanger these arrangements.
Finally, what about the next election race? A lack of clear political strategy was seen to undo the last PM. Burnham has choices to make which could determine his ultimate success or failure. Despite his justified appeal as a “Reform slayer” in Makerfield and Reform’s many self-inflicted wounds right now, it’s hard to say what the outcome of Farage “arguing with a bin” in the Clacton by-election, as Rachel Reeves waspishly put it, will ultimately have. Even if Reform are dented in voters’ mind by Farage’s financial judgments and the ensuing tumult, the beneficiary of this eruption might well be a Conservative resurgence that becomes a thorn in Burnham’s Adidas trainers.
Labour needs to take a potential Tory revival more seriously. For one thing, Kemi Badenoch has had a better run as Opposition leader, and Labour has a tired “ground game” against the Conservatives. That is also the view of one of its most successful campaign strategists who tells me: “It’s fine to remind voters of the dire Tory record. But by definition, that is getting further away every year, so the impact weakens – and you have to frame the contest with them as about a fight for the future – not just against Reform.”
For Burnham and Labour as a whole, fighting Farage feels like the ideological battle they can win. But a mix of Tory and Reform gains could pose a potential problem for a progressive coalition that is still a pretty vague notion. The promise of a pragmatic right-wing Tory party is looking more interesting to donors who marched towards Farageland.
So early memo to a new leader: prepare for a variety of different battles than the one you and your party would like to fight. It’s an adage that has long guided military successes – and it goes for new party leaders with their own battlefield ahead too.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at POLITICO and co-host of Politics at Sam and Anne’s podcast
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