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“Whenever Westminster has gone into a moment,” Andy Burnham lamented in one of his many interviews this week, “I have somehow been drawn into it.” Yeah, we’re all trying to find the guy who did this. Why is this happening to Andy Burnham, this fevered speculation that Labour’s Iron Throne has his name on it, which is now causing cabinet ministers, the prime minister and maybe even the bond markets to overtly or covertly slag him off? “I think what we’ve got to do,” Andy thought in another interview, “is to stop the sense in Westminster at times that everything is in flux.” Counterpoint: the sense in Westminster is that everything is completely and utterly fluxed. The wider country is considerably less optimistic.
Yet is Andy Burnham the answer? The Greater Manchester mayor would certainly appear to reckon so, having worked tirelessly this week to give himself pre-title billing at his party’s imminent gathering in Liverpool. Yup, here he comes – the King of the North, the cock of the conference, the memoji of Manchester – as unafraid to chat shit to those bond markets as he was to give that press conference in that jacket in that pandemic. The worry is that Andy is just one of those things that, during Covid, people thought were very good, but now realise are actually very bad. Like incipient alcoholism or Ted Lasso.
Maybe Burnham is less bad than Keir Starmer, which isn’t exactly the Kitemark, but also not the same as having a plan. Certainly, nobody is as bad as Britain’s problems, which is the main light flashing on the dashboard, and none of Burnham’s proposals thus far – some nationalisation and some wealth taxes – touch the sides of them.
In fairness, he’s not offering a policy platform at this stage, the stage where he’s implying he wants to be prime minister, not how he wants to be prime minister. It’s more of a vibe – if not to all tastes within the parliamentary Labour party. Consider the MP who told HuffPost: “Keir should say to him, ‘Any time you want, Andy, there’ll be a seat for you, and I want you in government.’ He’d shit himself. People would see how useless he is.” Housing secretary Steve Reed is another one who seems somehow unkeen on Andy making a conference entrance like the North Face Kylo Ren, describing Burnham as a “regional politician”, and warning against the risk of division. Risk division at this upcoming Labour conference? No spoilers, but it’s just possible we might have passed that particular event horizon.
Disappointing interjections like these seem to have been part of what sent Burnham back to the microphone: “I gave an honest answer and sometimes it feels to me that the Westminster world can’t deal with those answers.” Yeah, they can’t handle his truth. This is the Westminster world in which Burnham previously served loyally as a Blairite, a Brownite, a Corbynite and even a Starmerite, but he’d like you to know he’s been a long time out of that … swamp, would you call it? Certainly the insult “Westminster” is recurring increasingly often in Burnham’s pitch. I can’t bear the thought of him finding out where he’s going to have to work if his dream comes true.
Then again, despite the week bringing this new drama, it’s hard for anyone who has lived through the past decade of political turmoil in the UK not to feel there are at least familiar elements here. Having extracted my memories of the 2017 and 2018 Conservative party conferences from the coffin of earth I’d nailed them into, I am transported back to those times when some guy made both events absolutely all about him and his will-he-won’t-he leadership bid. As you might recall, the guy was Boris Johnson, fannying about like the blancmange Uncle Scar, driving half the attenders mad with political lust and the other half just mad. The then Henley MP John Howell spoke for a significant chunk of his colleagues at the 2017 Tory conference when he said: “My message to Boris is to keep his bloody mouth shut.” By the 2018 conference, many had become so openly weary of the Johnson manoeuvring that Howell ramped up to: “As far as I’m concerned, Boris can just fuck off.” In the 2019 Conservative leadership contest John Howell would vote – obviously, obviously – for Boris Johnson. Henley is currently represented by the Liberal Democrats.
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This is the country we’ve lived in for a very, very long time now – a place of endless churn, trending in the direction of seismic. We either get inadequate chancers (eg Johnson or Liz Truss) or chance inadequates (eg Theresa May, Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer), all of whom are forever being presented as the next true hope. We last drew one off the chance-inadequates pile, so maybe next time round it’s fated to be an inadequate chancer – a casting call Nigel Farage could definitely nail.
Andy Burnham belongs to the other pile, I think. But after the past week, and forgive this dip into Premier League history books, I now find it impossible to hear him giving it the full King of the North without thinking of Alex Ferguson’s dismissal of Paul Ince as a “big time Charlie”. Alas, some associative synaptic glitch means I now cannot hear the words “King of the North” without my brain changing them into “the Guv’nor” – a nickname that Ince bestowed upon himself, admittedly, while Andy’s was fitted to him by the media. And you know, Ince was probably underrated – don’t write in – so maybe that bodes well …
Even so, I did feel a tightening in my jaw when Andy informed the BBC this week that a tilt at the top job would need to be “more than a personality contest”. A personality contest between Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham? I guess we are where we are.
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
