A doe-eyed Andy Burnham has appeared looking sad across media outlets, hurt that he has been politically outmanoeuvred by Sir Keir Starmer. Burnham has positioned himself both as the wronged victim of Starmer’s Stalinist instincts and the only hope for a foundering party to find its popularity again. A cross between Bonnie Prince Charlie and Bambi’s Mother.
‘To decide is to divide’, Mr Alexander said. We were in deep Blairite doublespeak territory now
Appropriately, for what seems to resemble a community theatre production of Macbeth, the government wheeled out a Scottish MP for the media round. Clearly Douglas Alexander – a veteran of past Labour administrations where there were fifteen demonstrations of interpersonal psychopathy before breakfast – had been briefed to be as slippery as a lubed-up eel on an ice rink.
On Sky News, Mr Alexander was asked why it was that Mr Burnham had been denied his God-given destiny by an internal Labour subcommittee. He gave a series of exceptionally wordy descriptions of internal party wrangling, designed to remove culpability. All it gave was a sense of a man briefed to talk a lot whilst saying nothing.
This elicited a reaction from presenter Sophy Ridge: ‘You’re missing out a very key reason aren’t you?’
‘Tell me’ said Mr Alexander, with a face that looked like he was advertising Pepto-Bismol. There was an audible gulp. Inevitably she brought up the fact that Sir Keir had taken time out from bloviating and leading a G7 nation to attend said minor committee so that he could vote against Mr Burnham.
‘I don’t often compare myself to Elizabeth I,’ he said, which might have been the closest he got to candid honesty through the whole affair, ‘but I can’t make windows into men’s souls’.
The interviewer pushed him into a consideration of what the future scenarios might be. Mr Alexander deployed tenses hitherto unrecognised by grammarians about how he couldn’t possibly speculate on what might have happened if or when the glaringly obvious had occurred.
‘To decide is to divide’, Mr Alexander said. We were in deep Blairite doublespeak territory now. Words were reduced to sort of anti-aphorisms. Nothing meant anything anymore. We were no closer to having the mystery of Andy’s defenestration explained to us from the inside, but fortunately, we had that bastion of probity, Sir Keir himself to explain what had really gone on.
Sir Keir had been cornered in a pharmacy and interviewed in front of a selection of prophylactics, laxatives and other medicines. He looked greyer than ever, as if he’d taken a cocktail of the above. Why had he turned up to vote against Burnham? It transpired that he thought he was doing a ‘fantastic job’ as Mayor of Manchester, which is a bit like saying you thought your dog did a ‘fantastic job’ of fetching balls just after you’ve had it put down.
When pushed, he garbled some excuse about the need not to ‘divert our resources from elections we must win’. He claimed this was about Scotland and Wales but it’s feasible that he had other elections on his mind, like internal leadership ones perhaps?
In fact, there’s no great mystery to the Burnham affair. It’s a case of various egos, scrapping around for a crown of thorns while the rest of us have to live through their efforts to leave the country just a little bit worse than how they found it.
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