Today, in what will doubtless be just the first of many irritations inflicted on the unfortunate people of Makerfield, Labour launched their by-election campaign. The latest movement in what already feels like the 118th Brumaire of Andy Burnham.
The location he had chosen for the launch was a patch of irradiated tarmac; the sort of place criminals might take a mini fridge for an unceremonious fly-tipping. A van, parked on a slope, had a digital billboard attached, depicting a bizarre big-headed avatar of Burnham himself. It resembled a Funko Pop doll, the Japanese-inspired bits of plastic for which nerdy teenagers depart with obscene amounts of cash.
Next to the doll face was a plea: ‘Vote Andy for us’. Labour seems to specialise in these syntactically nonsensical slogans; is it asking people to commit electoral fraud? Is it an attempt to have Burnham extradited to the United States? Or have Labour just realised that their best bet is to come across as pitiable and craven as possible?
If I were Sir Keir, I’d cling to Burnham’s side
Around the van of doom were gathered a crowd holding placards bearing the same slogan. There were some signs that alluded to Labour, but these were mostly confined to the edges, presumably for easy cropping, like boyfriends not expected to make the course in a family wedding photo. Amongst this gaggle was Jonathan Reynolds, the chief whip who is, hilariously, in charge of maintaining Starmer’s authority. Yet the vagaries of party politics mean that here he was having to cheer on his would-be-executioner. His face said it all; he stood behind Burnham like a bald and bearded Madame Ceausescu.
Finally, Burnham arrived, just as the digital avatar screen began to malfunction and replace the top right corner of his head with an infinite black pixel void. Burnham started by saying how good it was to see friends and colleagues there, allowing for the fact that these were different categories. Reynolds looked like he wanted to drink glue.
‘Hope is in the air! Can you feel it?’ The crowd emitted an affirmative noise, which wanted to be enthusiastic but couldn’t help but sound sad. It was the sort of noise Florence Nightingale might have heard when asking a dying man if he wanted a drink of water on a particularly hot day in Scutari.
He tried to make the case that this by-election would be both about local issues, flooding and illegal waste disposal – and ‘a clarion call for change’. Burnham listed a lot of things that are wrong with the country – the care system, rail ticket prices, the housing ladder. It was hard to disagree with any of his diagnoses but even harder to work out what on earth he was proposing to do about anything. He used the word ‘change’ a lot without ever really clarifying what it meant.
The speech itself encapsulated the entire problem for the Mancunian Candidate. How can he possibly claim to be the person to bring about change when he is not only standing with a Labour rosette, but does so after having been an integral member of the governments that set the current catastrophe in motion? Burnham claimed this by-election was going to ‘put the main parties on the hook’. He managed to say this with a straight face today; whether he’ll be able to do so next week when he has to go door knocking with a certain Sir K. Starmer at his shoulder is a whole other matter.
Given Burnham is choosing to fight this as a faux insurgent, if I were Sir Keir, I’d cling to Burnham’s side. He’s probably booking out the presidential suite in the Makerfield Travelodge as I type.
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