Andy Burnham was at the government despatch box for the first time in nearly 17 years, having had the sort of carefree summer that one would normally associate with an Enid Blyton story rather than a premiership. His grand entrance was somewhat overshadowed by one final act of petty vindictiveness by Sir Keir Starmer who announced he was resigning his seat – despite repeatedly promising not to do so – just a couple of hours before Burnham was due to speak. On current form Sir Keir is going to make Ted Heath’s ‘Incredible Sulk’ look like the picture of magnanimity. Burnham thanked Starmer for his service in the same way one might thank the veterinary nurse who euthanised your pet gerbil.
As an aside, how fitting it is that Sir Keir’s departure should involve one final dollop of shamelessness, that having repeatedly taunted Rishi Sunak with suggestions that he’d move to California after losing the general election, Starmer should cut and run while Sunak remains in parliament. Mendacious and hypocritical to the very end. The sheer consistency is almost reassuring.
Not dwelling long on his predecessor, Burnham announced he was here to tell us all about ‘the direction’ in which he was going to take the country – northwards is surely the only answer to that. Or perhaps it was backwards; certainly much of what Burnham was announcing involved reversing a steamroller over actions put into motion by Sir Keir’s ministry.
Alas, not all of the obvious reversals had happened. Shortly before Burnham’s statement, Foreign Office underling Uma Kumaran confirmed that not only is No. 10 planning to revive the cursed Chagos ‘deal’, but that Burnham’s government will seek to pay the Mauritian wallet inspectors directly from the defence budget. Aka, channelling already insubstantial funds for national security and soldier pensions towards a policy that it has proved impossible for anyone to explain in a way that doesn’t make it sound like treason. Probably because it is. What pictures does Xi Jinping have of the Labour high command? How quickly will No. 10 North relocate to Port Louis? It remains absolutely baffling that as he tries to appear less damaging, corrupt and deranged than his predecessor, Burnham has seemingly doubled down on the worst piece of Starmerism of all.
‘This is politics done differently,’ purred Burnham, as if governing the nation were a lamb hot pot from a supermarket’s luxury ready meal range. Except it wasn’t really. We had a repeat of his Brassed Off/Billy Elliott tribute act about the wrong turns made by the country since the 1980s; conveniently failing to mention as always that he was a key member of the administration which, slap bang in the middle of that time period, made the greatest advances Hell-ward using the very best in modern handcart technology. ‘Change begins with honesty,’ burbled Burnham, ‘but I haven’t heard much of that this afternoon’. Amusingly, while he probably thought this made him sound like a tough-but-inspirational teacher in a remake of Kes, it was in fact a rather glorious self-own: the person who spoke for most of the afternoon was him.
Burnham promised to develop a ‘triple helix approach’ to economic development, by combining ‘business, academia and government’. The triple helix is a piece of deep policy management woo woo, which was considered nonsense even by the standards of the mid-noughties – itself a high point for managerial voodoo. Tellingly, for all the pie-and-chips plain speaking, when it actually comes to setting out a plan, Burnham seems to be as addicted to LinkedIn Lanyardism as any of his less articulate backbench colleagues. It’s such meaningless guff that Burnham might as well have dropped chicken blood on the dispatch box. Baron Samedi meets David Brent.
There were other snapshots of this sort of bizarre surrealism that Burnham’s schtick will inevitably throw up. He announced that plans for Cornish devolution would be drawn up, absurdly, at No. 10 North. Which parts of the country does that leave under No. 10 itself? The Scilly Isles? Iona? Herm? He announced that the same nexus would oversee ‘the rewiring of the British state’, a salutary remember that it’s generally during rewiring jobs that houses burn down. His plan for driving economic growth seemed mostly to involve sending civil servants to live in Weymouth or Warrington. It might be amusing to see senior mandarins exiled from London and forced to reckon with the country some of their number have played a pivotal role in ruining, but it is worrying that Burnham appears to think that it is by this – spreading the margarine of the public sector ever thinner – that you get growth as opposed to letting businesses create employment.
When economic reality collides with his dreamworld, Burnham will be in trouble
West Worcestershire MP Harriett Baldwin asked Burnham whether he could rule out further tax rises in the Budget. Burnham thanked her for her question, empathised with businesses’ struggles, batted his eyelashes – yet confirmed or denied nothing. Kemi Badenoch posed a number of direct questions to Burnham – on what he was actually going to do about small boats, taxation etc – and got answers to none of these either. Mrs Badenoch pointed out she knew a lot more about how he took his tea and his opinion on pork scratchings than about how he actually plans to pay for his plan or even move towards his less ambitious aims. As Burnham spoke to the House, gilts reached a full percentage point higher than they had done under Liz Truss.
When the economic reality of what he’s planning collides with his dreamworld, Burnham will be in trouble. However, it has to be said that he paints a picture – albeit an imaginary one – with aplomb. His predecessor presented his ideas to the House of Commons with a mix of sententious pomposity and comic incompetence, like a coroner ruling on the death of a clown. Burnham’s efforts are more compelling, for now, but the schtick might not survive the folly of what it is he’s actually proposing. Meaningless language and damaging policy remain both meaningless and damaging even when they’re delivered with a flutter of the eyelids and without the spam-hued psychopathy of his predecessor. How long it takes Burnham to realise this is the real question for the first part of his premiership.
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