Andy Burnham’s first party conference as leader has vast hoardings emblazoned with a “Hope Again” motto. It has second-marriage undertones – the implication being that hope had unfortunately died after the wedding night with the last incumbent and now we’re bravely having another go.
Hope is also the merchandise on insistent sale in the Liverpool conference centre. Lucy Powell has just rebranded her education fiefdom “my Department for Hope”, which teetered into Orwellian mode. No doubt, though, as one of the MPs driving the Prime Minister’s No 10 North plans puts it, the mood is more upbeat than last year: “It turns out that charisma does matter after all.”
That is the Burnham we have been introduced to – confident, cheerful – returning here as Labour’s victor ludorum over a vanquished Sir Keir Starmer, just a year after mounting his challenge.
Behind the scenes, however, the new premier is a more reflective and even sombre character. This week, he made what may turn out to be the most significant move of his leadership: putting paid to a stubborn rumour that, with a polling uptick behind him, he might plump for an early election. “All of this speculation on an early election, I can knock that dead.”
Behind that reassurance lie clues to the concerns a new leader has about his own trajectory. This conference will be dominated by twin pillars of his project – his plan for social care as the big domestic achievement he wants to define his premiership, and his attack on rises in welfare spending, when his party has shown, in the blooding of Starmer and his former chancellor Rachel Reeves, that it finds welfare cuts squeamish territory.
The headlong retreat from any talk of consulting the public via a general election, despite the latest deep-dive MRP poll suggesting Labour would presently end up as the largest force in Parliament and dictate terms for any supporting deal with the Lib Dems and Greens, is very telling.
It shows that Burnham and his inner team do not yet feel that his core offer of broad tax rises to pay for social care and defence would land well enough with the public to offset the weaknesses of the damaged and divided Reform UK and Conservative parties.
That sense that Burnham is still getting to grips with his new role comes across in a slightly angsty New Statesman interview, in which he sought to reassure us that he does indeed have a plan for wielding power as well as grabbing it. Despite a boosterish write-up, he sounded a bit uncertain. If you have animal instincts for grabbing power, in the manner of Tony Blair or Boris Johnson, you do not tend to need to telegraph that the job of being Prime Minister is one which comes with being in charge. You just assume you are in charge, and crack onwards.
It suggests that Burnham and his intimates know that the popularity he enjoys – including strong personal ratings by the standards of other party leaders – is still nowhere near a firm enough foundation on which to go to the country. Paul Ovenden, the most hardline pragmatist of the ex-Starmer aides, also reflects that a campaign in the present circumstances would end up as a “general election in which Labour campaigned for a bunch of unspecified tax rises at a time when it had already lavished additional public spending on sectoral interests”.
Harsh, but with too many grains of truth not to give pause for thought. Instead, Burnham will focus on a longer march, which also gives him time to settle into No 10 and establish himself on the international stage. Yesterday on the BBC, he confirmed something interesting about his timeline: namely that he will fight the next election on the social-care pledge, saying: “That will be where the plan gets tested… recognising that it might be difficult or unpopular with some, but that is the way to do it, to get that endorsement and then introduce the system in the next Parliament.”
That means that on the single issue by which the Prime Minister defines himself most earnestly – citing his late father’s decline with dementia as the source of his understanding of social-care needs and systemic holes – there will be a considerable delay in acting on the issue he sets most personal store by remedying.
The other test he will face is how he brings his own ranks along in an area where they are nowhere near as keen on reform – namely welfare, and especially how to stem the rise in benefit entitlements among the working-age sick, and how to prevent young people sliding into a benefit system without a clear exit strategy. Burnham has signalled that he does understand the need for welfare reforms that eluded his predecessor. A lot of this will be dressed up in the language of enhancing “support” and “opportunity” to help people out of work for mental health reasons access treatment and help – but the message needs to be that this cannot be at the cost of being available for work, or actively looking to enter the job market and stay there.
The conference and his MPs need to hear these terms and this intention more clearly from the man at the top. Too long has been spent on the Timms review (on personal independence payments (PIP) – the topic on which the legislation faltered last year) and Alan Milburn’s mission to fix the incentives of the welfare system to address high levels of young people using it to skirt work or training.
Yet it has been far easier for politicians pitching from the soft left of the spectrum to find welfare reform distasteful – a legacy of the skinflint Tories. Or, as in the revolt which united key Burnhamites in Parliament, like Powell and Louise Haigh, for such politicians to define themselves by the parts of the attack on PIP they did not accept.
What has changed? “Andy is in the driving seat,” says one senior figure pushing for a clearer line this week. Bluntly put, it means that now Burnham’s dreams of prominence have come true; he can no longer act solely as a refusenik. He will not be judged on ifs, buts and nuances – the currency of internal opposition. Instead, the pressure of delivery is now squarely on him – and he will be judged by the result.
It lays down the gauntlet at this conference for how Burnham brings along previous critics of a reform he cannot afford to fudge. Frankly, they’d rather talk about other things and do them nice and slowly. That is another reason he does not feel election-ready – because the contours of his premiership are still being defined.
Real power is about getting people to do what you want, not just having them applaud the parts of you they already like. That is the acid test of Liverpool, when the cheers die down and Labour hopes – again – for a leader who can actually make stuff happen.
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