My A-Level politics teacher told a story about Harold Wilson that I so wanted to be accurate, I haven’t dared check its provenance until just now. Happily, it’s true: the pipe which was always to be found clamped between the prime ministerial teeth or being brandished expressively in his hand was largely a prop. In private, away from the cameras, he preferred cigars.
That famous pipe not only provided working class credentials to a politician whose first career was in dusty academia, fiddling with it also helped him control his nerves. Remarkably, given modern sensibilities, he would fill and puff away on the thing during television interviews and so convey an image of approachable avuncularity.
Andy Burnham doesn’t have a pipe, but the first major achievement of his premiership is the successful establishment of both working class credentials and approachable avuncularity. And unlike Wilson, his are almost certainly not confected. This may well prove to be the key to seeing off the threats posed by Nigel Farage and, increasingly, Kemi Badenoch.
It is easy to pooh-pooh the prioritisation of style over substance but, as Wilson’s story shows, it is nothing new and is more relevant now than ever. Consider, for example, the case of Ed Miliband, whose appointment as Foreign Secretary constituted the second biggest surprise of Burnham’s first Cabinet.
Despite his ridiculous tabloid nickname, “Red Ed” is a ruthless ideologue. Driven and fearless, he has survived years of hysterical attacks from right-wing media – including an unconscionable assault upon the reputation of his dead, war hero father – and dashed his own brother on the rocks of his political ambition.
For much of the British public, however, he remains haunted by a bacon sandwich he struggled to eat decorously in unfortunate proximity to press photographers and a passing but undeniable resemblance to Wallace of Wallace and Gromit fame. The gulf, in other words, between the perception and the reality of Miliband the politician is enormous and, it has transpired, impossible to close.
Keir Starmer is (or was) a victim of the same curse. Like Miliband, he has a “weedy” voice and a set of political skills at odds with the image he presents to the public. He was, in many ways, very lucky to rise to prominence when he did, first, as not-Corbyn and then as not-Johnson.
Defined in both cases by the men he was not, when the floor was finally his, he struggled to tell a convincing story of who he was and what he believed. In the end, this mattered more than his extraordinary successes sanitising the Labour Party and winning a general election by a landslide.
It’s also why Badenoch became progressively better at facing him during PMQs. Admittedly, the bar was on the floor when she started, but the arc of improvement was steep enough to send her rival Robert Jenrick scurrying for the cover of Reform, and was built largely on her own peculiar brand of authenticity. A charming performance at Starmer’s valedictory outing only served to highlight how charmless she normally is. But ignorance and cruelty have their fans, and Badenoch, who looks increasingly comfortable in her own skin, is clearly determined to fight Farage for them.
The latter’s pint glass is, like Harold Wilson’s pipe, gloriously inauthentic. When the photographers have packed up their cameras, he reportedly prefers expensive wines to utilitarian ales. And with Christopher Harborne’s secretly gifted £5 million, he can finally afford to pay for them himself.
And yet, the Reform UK leader remains one of the most effective negotiators of the gulf between perception and reality in British political history. More people are waking up to the fact that the approachable avuncularity he so carefully cultivates is a million miles away from the greed and preening petulance on display more recently. But it’s far too soon to write him off and, as Michael Crick wrote in these pages on Monday, he remains the biggest threat to Burnham’s political fortunes.
All of which explains why the most significant thing Burnham has done this week is to be Burnham. I last sat down with him properly four years ago and, during a long conversation in which his leadership ambitions were never far from the surface, was most struck by two things.
First, the contention that championing the cause of Hillsborough families and effecting real change in Manchester had cured him of self-diagnosed “imposter syndrome”. In contrast to the dithering and failure that characterised his Westminster career after Labour’s 2010 election defeat, he knows who he is now and will no longer try to mould himself into what he thinks a Westminster politician should be.
Second, and rather more improbably: buses. The cap he introduced on Mancunian fares, he told me during a conversation that took place next door to Parliament, “makes me happier than anyone here would understand”. It seemed a strange boast at the time but I get it now. Meaningful and measurable change to the lives and experiences of normal people is the metric by which Andy Burnham version 2.0 judges success. It’s why he has already announced the abolition of VAT on electricity bills and it’s why he has prioritised the end of rough sleeping.
And it’s why, with the sorry consequences of previously misplaced optimism still in my rear-view mirror, I not only believe that he really will endeavour to “rewire” the country, but also that he may succeed. Burnham is now a politician who is exactly as he appears. There is no pipe, no gulf between the perception of Andy Burnham and the reality. We’ve almost forgotten what that looks like.
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