There is no situation room, no wall of flatscreens or a hotline to the White House, just a few chairs patrolled by ‘quite a mad dog’. But a garden in Golborne, on the outskirts of Wigan, is now ground zero in three different operations which will decide the future of Britain. The first is Op Makerfield, the campaign for Andy Burnham to win this week’s by-election. The second is Op Leadership, to line up Labour MPs, trade unions and donors for the showdown which may follow. The third is Op Transition, the plans to install a Burnham-led government.
‘Loads of it has been done in Andy’s garden,’ says a close ally. ‘Half of us in the garden, the other half online. We’re having to run a by-election campaign, a leadership campaign and preparations for government simultaneously. At the beginning Andy was rightly just focused on Makerfield. But as we’ve got closer, we’ve been carving out time to think beyond.’
Presiding over all three operations are the ‘northern Queens’ – former transport secretary Louise Haigh and Anneliese Midgley, the canny MP for Knowsley and a former political director for Unite – alongside Burnham’s longstanding aide Kevin Lee. Those who remember the exploits of Boris Johnson’s dog Dilyn will be delighted to know there is also a badly behaved hound. ‘Andy’s got quite a mad dog that has been disrupting proceedings on a very regular basis,’ a source reveals. ‘Lots of barking and hunting mice and he took quite a shine to Anneliese.’
‘Keir can go in a dignified way that protects whatever legacy he wants, or he can allow a load of bloodletting’
At the time of going to print, Op Makerfield is not a totally done deal. Two of Burnham’s top team parrot the same line: ‘It’s closer than you think.’ But those advising the Manchester mayor think the scale of any win will determine the speed of events. ‘If he wins by low single digits, Keir Starmer digs in and says: “You can’t come for me until after the Manchester mayoral election on 30 July,” and it’s bloody trench warfare,’ one says. ‘If it’s a comfortable, single-digits win, the soft left will try to take power through a conversation, but they will probably discover that power has to be taken by force. If Andy gets more than Reform plus Restore combined, start the clock. There will be an avalanche.’
Burnham’s team rejects claims he will move against Starmer straightaway, accusing the PM’s aides of ‘briefing into existence that it’s going to be an immediately aggressive, hostile act’. A senior figure says: ‘It absolutely isn’t. He’ll want to give Keir proper time and space to come to terms with how things are changing over the weekend and hopefully Keir genuinely reflects on how things have changed. We want to keep this as friendly and controlled as possible. We want it to be negotiated and we really hope that Keir can get into that mindset.’ Burnham’s key allies, along with deputy leader Lucy Powell and Ed Miliband, will lean on Starmer to talk to Burnham. ‘There’ll be an attempt for a meeting at some point next week,’ one says.
Both sides acknowledge that it may not be possible to keep things polite, not least because Starmer is determined to resist a challenge. ‘He’s been saying he’ll fight it with his mouth for weeks, but he didn’t look like he’ll fight it in his eyes,’ says one loyalist. ‘But that has changed. I think he means it. He’s realised that just because someone asks for your job, you shouldn’t just give it to them.’ Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s former chief of staff, sent the PM ‘a note’ calling on him to ‘keep going’. To buy himself time, Starmer’s allies have wargamed the idea that he should offer Burnham a cabinet post immediately to shame him into rejecting it.
Starmer still has some cabinet support. But a gambit, attributed by several sources to McSweeney, for Starmer to sack Miliband and Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, who are perceived to have been plotting with Burnham, blew up on the launch pad last week. Starmer called in a group of ministers of state, the second tier of his government, in a bid to secure their backing and to hint that the big jobs might soon be theirs if they stick with him – but it was a disaster. ‘He asked them to back him and got basically no support at all,’ a ministerial aide says. ‘Some were actively telling him it was over. Keir was very visibly angry at the end of these meetings.’ Even loyalist advisers now say sackings are ‘probably too dangerous’.
Burnham’s Op Leadership team is adamant that if Starmer fights, things will get ugly. One adviser says: ‘It would turn the herd into a stampede against him. It would be like The Lion King.’ Another adds: ‘Keir can go in a dignified way that protects whatever legacy he wants, or he can allow a whole load of bloodletting where his legacy is completely trashed, the party’s bloodied and I don’t think the government would ever recover from it.’
Starmer, they claim, is in no position to fight a leadership election. ‘Keir’s been ringing around donors and has been coming up short,’ says a former cabinet minister. ‘He’s been labouring under a false set of assumptions. They don’t have a trade union backing them. They don’t have the PLP [Parliamentary Labour party] and they don’t have the donors anymore. How can you run a leadership campaign if you don’t have any of those things?’
The third player is Wes Streeting, who recently quit as health secretary and claims to have the backing of more than the 81 MPs he would need to join a leadership contest. Both Starmer and Burnham’s allies think his support is soft. ‘As soon as Andy wins, the world changes,’ observes a former Starmer aide. ‘At that point Wes will lose about 60 of his 50 supporters.’ Streeting is hamstrung because some of his backers are ministers who may not wish to move publicly against Starmer. A Burnham aide insists: ‘People that were absolutely on his list in the week after the local elections are now firmly on our list.’ Burnham’s team are sharing an MRP superpoll with MPs showing that a Labour party led by Streeting would win just 14 seats.
The widespread assumption is that Streeting wants a good cabinet job from Burnham. ‘He’s in Save Wes mode,’ says a ministerial adviser. But, if this is the plan, it does not seem to be working. Streeting has made several campaign trips to Makerfield, but Burnham has refused to see him. ‘Andy was never available,’ a Burnham ally smirks.
Nonetheless, Starmer’s allies want to goad Streeting into running, since McSweeney believes Starmer would have a better chance in a three-way contest. They say Streeting must run or he will let down those ministers who resigned with him after the local elections. ‘He’ll be a busted flush,’ a government official says.
Burnham’s team admits that Op Transition is the most difficult of the three – and the resignation last week of defence secretary John Healey and armed forces minister Al Carns over the long-delayed Defence Investment Plan, is a major headache for whoever is prime minister. It has been reported that there is a £28 billion shortfall in current MoD spending. Healey quit because Starmer and Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, were offering him only £13.5 billion and Healey calculated that only around £10 billion was new money. However, political sources, officials and commanders say privately that the shortfall is far worse. ‘It’s in the low 30 billions,’ a defence source admits. That means cuts of around £20 billion if more money is not forthcoming.
Insiders say the ‘original sin’ was that Starmer and Healey accepted a Strategic Defence Review (SDR) last June predicated on Britain continuing to ‘do everything’ as well as transition to a new generation of warfare. Last autumn, when Starmer realised there wasn’t enough money, he put his head in his hands and complained: ‘Why are you doing this to me, John?’ A defence insider says: ‘There is no world in which you can make that plan fit the money which is being offered.’
A Burnham adviser says: ‘Reeves is an absentee chancellor who literally refused to do her job’
Reeves is accused of ‘open insubordination’ by one Starmer ally, offering just £7 billion and then refusing to force cuts on other departments to make up the shortfall, leaving it to No. 10 to lean on reluctant ministers. ‘She downed tools big time,’ a Starmer loyalist says. A Burnham adviser adds: ‘She is an absentee chancellor who literally refused to do her job.’
The Treasury blames Healey for ‘going along with’ the idea last year that the SDR was ‘deliverable’ with defence spending at 2.5 per cent of GDP. It will hit 2.6 per cent next year, but Reeves has refused to set out any plan to reach 3 per cent by 2030, which Healey demanded, or the 3.5 per cent Starmer told Nato the UK will reach by 2035.
Starmer has been repeatedly warned this is untenable and defence experts are trying to communicate this to Burnham. The former chief of the defence staff Admiral Sir Tony Radakin wrote to Healey and Starmer a year ago warning that strategic ambitions did not match investment. His successor, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, has written again to the PM in recent days, saying there will have to be huge cuts. Knighton told peers on Monday that the armed forces will have to ‘dial back our… exercise and operational activity’. Jonathan Powell, the national security adviser, also wrote to Starmer a month before Healey’s resignation saying he needed to find the £18 billion the defence secretary was demanding.
The challenge for the new Defence Secretary, Dan Jarvis, and potentially for Burnham, is that a fundamental choice is approaching. ‘There has to be more money or the government has to change its policy,’ a senior defence figure says. ‘That means a new SDR.’ Despite claims that Jarvis might seek more money, No. 10 sources are clear that he had to accept the £13.5 billion settlement as a precondition of taking the job. However, insiders say both No. 10 and the Treasury are ‘rethinking’ whether they need a ‘firmer timeline’ to hit 3 per cent and 3.5 per cent of GDP ahead of the Nato summit, which starts on 7 July.
Failure to act could lead to mass resignations by senior commanders. Service chiefs had informal discussions last week about whether they should all quit. ‘There was a bit of talk about whether they were collectively going to say they couldn’t sign up to it,’ a former mandarin reveals. ‘They were girding themselves to make that threat.’ A second source confirms there were ‘discussions’ about a joint resignation. ‘They’re being asked to do something which is not achievable. It’s insane.’
Healey’s resignation was a ‘complete surprise’ to Burnham. He supports new ‘defence bonds’, a form of borrowing, along with international deals, savings from welfare reform and potentially tax rises to boost MoD spending. ‘Andy’s got a lot of economists working for him,’ says a senior
Burnhamite. ‘There is a lot of thinking about how they can fund it within the existing spending envelope, but also creative ways through. Bonds and multinational approaches should have been considered 18 months ago. There has been limited creative thinking from the Treasury.’
Cabinet Secretary Antonia Romeo could not authorise contact talks between Burnham’s team and civil servants without Starmer’s approval, but Burnham is not short of advice. As one friend says: ‘Various people are getting in touch from the civil service and every expert in the land wants to descend and share their wisdom.’ Josh Simons, who stood down as MP in Makerfield to make way for Burnham, and Miatta Fahnbulleh, a Miliband ally who resigned as a minister, are key figures in the policy operation, though even insiders acknowledge ‘tensions’ over Burnham’s programme. A Labour MP who thinks he is trying to be all things to all people remarks: ‘The contest is about telling the MPs and the membership they can all have a pony.’
Burnham’s team insists ‘no deals have been done with anyone’, but No. 10 claims Haigh is offering ministerial jobs. Burnham and Jarvis know each other from Jarvis’s time as mayor of South Yorkshire, so he could keep the defence job. Some think Healey could be chancellor to enact the changes needed. But as one ministerial aide says: ‘Defence is not really what Andy wants to spend his money on.’ Mahmood is thought to be keen to stay at the Home Office to continue her crackdown on immigration, something Burnham has now said he backs, despite the reservations of many MPs.
The favourite for the Treasury is Miliband. He, along with Powell and Lisa Nandy, is in nearly daily contact with Burnham. ‘Ed Miliband is discovering that he doesn’t need to be leader of the Labour party to run the country,’ says a second former cabinet minister.
‘If Starmer was a dog, you would have put him down by now’
Burnham’s allies reject the idea that he is out of touch with national issues. ‘What I have learned about him through this process is just how much experience he’s had as mayor, which covers almost every domestic policy going,’ one says. ‘This idea that he’s not prepared because he’s been out of Westminster for nine years is just such bullshit.’
Claims that Kevin Lee or Sue Gray might be chief of staff are also wrong. ‘Under no circumstances,’ says a Burnham friend. The frontrunner is actually Caroline Simpson, the chief executive of the Greater Manchester Authority.
And what of the man himself? Burnham knows the challenge he faces. ‘He’s definitely had some sleepless nights and some wake-up moments,’ says a close ally. ‘There’s been a couple of times where I’ve seen the fear in his eyes about the risk we’ve taken, which is actually really reassuring because it shows he’s not a sociopath. The scale of the challenge in Makerfield is huge and then the scale of the challenge of what comes next is even bigger.’
If Burnham wins, MPs are likely to call for Starmer to quit over the weekend. Then it will be time for the cabinet. If Starmer digs in and ministers don’t act, Starmer loyalists claim the Burnham plan is to ‘rile up the women’s PLP with the idea that this is all about men and they need to act – get a woman to go over the top’. Two power brokers could hold the key. Yvette Cooper, the Foreign Secretary, told friends this week that both the PM and his challengers must be ‘respectful’. That probably means telling Starmer he should negotiate with Burnham over an orderly departure date. Others speculate that Reeves could make a final bid to ingratiate herself with the left by calling for Starmer to go.
The timetable is complicated by the Nato summit on 7 July, a UK-EU summit on post-Brexit trade negotiations on 22 July and the Manchester mayoral vote on 30 July. Most think Burnham will be in Downing Street by September at the latest. A former Labour adviser says of the Prime Minister: ‘If he was a dog, you would have put him down by now.’
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