‘Burned out’ Burnham was never the answer to Labour’s problems

Labour’s decision to halt the mayor of Greater Manchester’s leadership manoeuvring was not callous but realistic. Allowing it to continue would have handed the party’s opponents an open goal, says Sean O’Grady – and solved none of its deeper problems

As in so many areas of life, it’s a good idea to make decisions about your political career by asking how others, friendly or otherwise, might view them. So it is with Andy Burnham.

Had the Labour leadership not been ruthless enough to put the interests of the party first and block Burnham’s latest half-hearted, half-arsed attempt at a leadership bid, we know, don’t we, what would have followed. From now on, every week at Prime Minister’s Questions, Kemi Badenoch would have been jabbing her finger at the government benches, lecturing Labour about its permanent leadership crisis.

Whether Burnham was parked on the front bench as a semi-loyal minister, or further back as an occasional, but pungent, northern voice of dissent, the line would have been the same: Starmer would have been cast as a weak leader of a divided party, who can’t even get his own MPs to back him. Every other Tory and Reform politician would have piled in with identical attacks. The effect would have been debilitating. This was, after all, precisely what Starmer once did to successive Tory leaders, and with enormous glee.

This, in essence, was the reality Starmer pointed to when he defended the decision of Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) to block Burnham from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election. The prime minister argued that the issue was focus, not fear.

“We have really important elections across England, Wales and Scotland that will affect millions of people,” Starmer said. “We need all our focus on those contests, campaigning on the cost of living. Andy Burnham is doing a great job as mayor of Manchester, but holding a mayoral election when it isn’t necessary would divert money and people away from elections we must fight and win. That was the basis of the NEC decision.”

Had events unfolded differently over the past 10 days or so, the Conservatives might have closed their own leadership psychodrama with the departure of Robert Jenrick at the exact moment when Labour, true to its historic propensity for self-destruction, imported the man most likely to depose its own leader. Burnham insisted he was merely there to support the government, but one wonders.

Some of us are old enough to remember the last time the former leader of a great British city entered parliament – Ken Livingstone. In an inspired move, the editor of this newspaper at the time offered him a weekly column. I was deputed to look after the copy, and I can still recall that the very first opinion “Red” Ken offered The Independent’s open-minded readership was that the chancellor, Gordon Brown, should resign.

That was in 1998, just months into Brown’s long and largely successful stewardship of the public finances, during a period of strong, sustained, non-inflationary growth. It is hard not to wonder, protestations aside, what kind of interventions Burnham might have made about Rachel Reeves’s admittedly less sure-footed management of the Treasury.

Prime minister Keir Starmer blocked Andy Burnham’s bid to stand in the Gorton and Denton by-election (Getty)

The past few weeks of Burnhamery confirm that, like Livingstone before him, the self-styled “King of the North” lacks a practical and popular alternative programme for government. The imagined premiership of Burnham has always been more about vibes than policy.

What would Prime Minister Burnham actually be like? He would sound and act different, and appear warmer and more sympathetic, albeit with an irritatingly needy, passive-aggressive streak that might quickly begin to grate on the public – something we glimpsed again in his pointless complaints about the election process.

In practice, he would be eaten for breakfast by Nigel Farage, with Badenoch left to pick over the remains. There was no polling evidence that Burnham could turn Labour’s fortunes around, because he could not have done.

A notional Burnham government, with Ed Miliband as chancellor, would simply have spent a little more, borrowed a little more, and left interest rates and inflation marginally higher than otherwise. He would not have been able to defy the financial markets and tell them where to get off – because if he had tried, he would have ended up being Labour’s answer to Liz Truss.

Burnham would be no more able than Starmer to stop the boats, reduce crime or revive struggling towns. He would certainly struggle to deal with Donald Trump.

A platform he grandly calls “Manchesterism” means very little, and would play badly in Essex. In truth, Burnham represents the kind of soft-left Labour leadership voters rejected in the Kinnock and Miliband eras, however appealing it might be to party members and MPs.

To borrow a slogan, Burnham did not offer “Change” in anything more than style. When the Conservatives ditched Margaret Thatcher for John Major in 1990, they paired that decision with clear policy shifts – ending the poll tax and moving “to the heart of Europe”. It revived their electoral fortunes, even if it all later ended in tears.

The same applied when Boris Johnson ousted Theresa May in 2019 to “get Brexit done”. These moments involved not just a change of tone but a radical shift in how the country was governed.

Burnham was never going to offer that. The funds are not available to remake the welfare state or nationalise industries, nor is the electoral support there – not even in the North.

The same constraints apply to Angela Rayner. Nor would the right-wing alternatives to Starmer – Shabana Mahmood or Wes Streeting – escape it. All would face the same brutal obstacle to their freedom of manoeuvre: money.

Any of them might be better storytellers and stronger performers than Starmer, but the government’s problems run far deeper than communication. Perhaps, one day, a genuinely radical and electorally popular alternative will emerge – one that is prepared to reverse Brexit, or shrink the state. There is no sign of it yet. For now, it is all just vibes.