Each new prime minister is a reaction to the last: Boris Johnson was the chaotic and colourful response to Theresa May, David Cameron the smooth reaction to Gordon Brown – who was himself the heavyweight, brooding solution to Tony Blair’s spin and megawatt smile. Andy Burnham’s humanity and emotion are the perfect contrast to Keir Starmer’s inability to muster a personality or a lasting policy that anyone liked. But quite often those qualities that contrast the most with a leader’s predecessor end up being part of their own downfall too. We might already be seeing that with Burnham.
This week, after spending the summer “turning over every single stone” to work out how to prevent two of the killers of PC Andrew Harper from being eligible for the early release scheme, Burnham announced he had come up with a way of keeping them in prison. Anyone convicted of manslaughter will now be excluded from early release. Initially, the Prime Minister said he had pushed to the very limits of what he could do when he made some modest tweaks to Starmer’s criteria for early release. He had expressed frustration that he couldn’t go further, and for about 24 hours ministers were sent out to argue that their hands were tied in the case of Harper’s killers, and it looked like they would be released early. Now, they’ve found a way of undoing those knots – though the consequence of keeping all criminals with manslaughter convictions inside will be quite profound for the overcrowded prison system.
There are also other knock-on impacts of this change, which may not immediately be felt. Burnham has made policy on the basis of his emotional response. On one level, politics should be conducted with humanity and empathy – no leader should make decisions without thinking of the consequences for individual families. The consequences for the family of PC Harper of seeing Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers walk free from prison early would have been devastating. Burnham had said he “wouldn’t forgive” himself if he didn’t try everything he could to block that particular release. Harper’s family, who have done so much to campaign in his name and change the law for greater protections for frontline emergency workers in this country, have expressed their relief, but his mother has also said “I worry immensely for those it doesn’t happen for”.
As she says, there are others for whom Burnham really couldn’t push the limits any further – domestic abusers will be walking free in October. Often, their victims are unable to mount high-profile campaigns, and are instead preparing to feel significantly less safe. The Government is trying to do all it can to protect them, but once again, ministers are butting up against a probation service that has been on its knees for years, and a tagging system that is poorly-enforced.
The child protection system, also stretched so thin that it’s been tearing for years, will also have to reclassify many children as high-risk on the basis that their abuser is no longer kept safely away from them while in prison. I understand there is more to be announced on protecting these much lower-profile victims, but the reality is that they will see their abusers walk free earlier than they had anticipated, and Burnham cannot skew the system any further to help them.
The Prime Minister simply cannot respond with emotion to all of these victims. He would be personally overwhelmed, for one thing, like the wall of sound that George Eliot describes in Middlemarch when she warns that “if we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence”. The policy equivalent of dying of a roar would be to be paralysed by the emotional consequences of a decision that no prime minister would, in an ideal world, have to take. Thus far in politics, he has been able to listen to individual campaigners on Hillsborough, contaminated blood and other grave injustices, and pursue those campaigns. Now, he will have to respond to the roar of thousands of campaigns, thousands of grieving victims, and thousands of decisions that, whichever way he turns, will cause pain. We don’t yet know how he will bear that.
At the moment, the public seems to like Burnham’s humanity. His displays of emotion – talking about his dad’s Alzheimer’s, speaking “from the heart” when outlining his plans for social care reform – make him seem more normal. So too does his frustration with impossible situations like overcrowded prisons and early release. But he may find that in time, voters turn on him in frustration too, when they realise that, underneath all the emotion, he hasn’t been able to achieve much more than the man he was brought in as a reaction to.
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