As coronations go, this was a particularly flat one. Instead of Zadok the Priest we were treated to New Order. To nobody’s surprise Andy Burnham was unveiled this afternoon as Leader of the Labour party to a select audience of lanyard-wearing goons, cronies and Neil Kinnock.
First we were subjected to Lucy Powell, who had the distinction of being sacked by Keir Starmer for being too incompetent. In a cabinet which includes Rachel Reeves that’s no mean feat. ‘It’s kinda non-uniform day,’ babbled Powell, who is astonishingly the Deputy Leader of the governing party of a G7 power and not Deputy Idiot of a village somewhere. The Russians and the Chinese must be crapping themselves.
‘I’m pleased and proud of how we’ve gone through this process, as one Labour family,’ Powell described the defenestration of a sitting Prime Minister as if it were a Teddy Bear’s picnic. Perhaps a chimp’s tea party would be more accurate. ‘We’ve shown the best version of ourselves to the country,’ Powell continued, radiating inanity. If this has been the Labour party’s best version of themselves then God only knows what their worst version looks like. Powell implied that they should be proud of the fact they’ve not spent the last month running naked smeared in goat’s blood and bird faeces.
Let’s hope the audience were provided with sick bags
After Powell finally stopped talking there was an amusingly North Korean moment when Shabana Mahmood had to announce the results of the ‘contest’ – cue much haw hawing from the audience – but then it was over to Burnham.
Much of it was retreading the well-worn path of his claim to be in politics for the forgotten people of Britain. ‘We’re going to give them hope back,’ he cooed. Burnham’s whole speech was filled with this sort of sub-Disney platitude. What was lacking was any sense of how he intended to do this. We know more about Burnham’s views on queuing in pubs and whether milk should go into tea first than we do about his economic policy, plans for government or even who will populate his Cabinet.
He claimed he was going to promote ‘a culture of one Labour team’ but again it wasn’t clear how this was going to happen. Is he just going to flutter his eyelashes at the Labour party and hope it magically makes them less egregiously psychotic? There was a Partridgian interlude too as he declared that ‘I draw my strength from people. I hear things, pick up straws in the wind.’ It’s worth dwelling on that final phrase: ‘I hear things, pick up straws in the wind.’ He presumably thinks this makes him sound folksy and relatable when actually on closer inspection it’s the sort of thing an ominous hollow-eyed farm worker in a Stephen King novel might say when asked about the whereabouts of an old Indian graveyard. I suspect that, as with Starmer, there is as yet unplumbed weirdness to Burnham which will come to the fore now he’s in the spotlight.
The speech was just things we’d heard before – quite literally in some cases, as he repeated some of his more egregiously schmaltzy lines, ‘good growth in every postcode and hope in every heart’. Let’s hope the audience were provided with sick bags. In fact, if Burnham insists on continuing with the ‘Lassie come home’ act in lieu of actual policy, then the whole country will need them.
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