Poor old Andy and those sad eyes of his. The Mayor of Greater Manchester has had a pretty rotten day, being blocked by his own party’s ruling National Executive Committee (NEC) by some eight votes to one. His sole backer was Lucy Powell, whose candidacy for deputy leader was memorably likened to Lurleen to Burnham’s George Wallace: a useful proxy to circumvent constitutional limits.
Burnham initially sought to take all this with good grace. ‘Tomorrow I return with full focus to my role as Mayor of GM’, he declared defiantly on X, ‘defending everything we have built in our city-region over many years. I decided to put myself forward to prevent the divisive politics of Reform from damaging that. We are stronger together and let’s stay that way.’ Hear hear: all for one and one for all, eh comrade?
Of course, this being our Andy, such high-mindedness did not last long. He then remarked that:
The fact that the media was informed of the NEC decision before I was tells you everything you need to know about the way the Labour Party is being run these days. You would think that over 30 years of service would count for something but sadly not.
Such a claim has been rejected by senior Labour sources, with one telling the press that it is ‘uncategorically untrue’ that the party briefed the media before telling the mayor. But that has not stopped good old Burnham. He has now suggested that Labour will lose the Gorton and Denton by-election, rounding on Tom Baldwin, Keir Starmer’s biographer and favourite journalist. After Baldwin suggested that ‘the prospect of him returning to Westminster has already added to inward-looking psychodrama that does no one any good’, Burnham replied:
I’m not sure losing a by-election does us any good either, Tom.
Talk about Burnham and flog’em eh?
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