Andy burnham

I have spent the past week marvelling at the behaviour of our commentating class. They seem to have whipped themselves back into that familiar frenzy which must lead, inexorably, to the Prime Minister stepping down. ‘He has to go’; ‘The most incompetent prime minister of my lifetime’; ‘Things can’t go on like this’ – these were the general sentiments revolving around Keir Starmer even before his party’s thumping in last week’s local elections. The problem is that some of us have a long-ish memory. So when people say the Starmer government is uniquely incompetent or ineffectual, a tiny flare goes off in my mind. Have these people forgotten Theresa May?

Dear wannabe leaders of Britain. What a lot of you there are! I’ve been writing about leadership and the craft of politics for 25 years and I’m sick of watching the same mistakes repeated. I’m keen to help. So listen up Nigel, Kemi, Zack, Ed, Ed, Andy, Angela and Wes – and you Keir, it’s never too late to learn. 1) TL;DR: If you have no time for impertinent journalists, here’s the executive summary. You need a plan, plus strategy and tactics to deliver it. You need a narrative to explain it to voters. You need the charisma and application to take your party, the civil service and the country with you. And you need to build a team to do the bits that you cannot accomplish alone.

If Keir Starmer didn’t already understand Harold Macmillan’s warning about ‘events, dear boy, events’, he got a lesson on Saturday. At 4.49 p.m. on Truth Social, Donald Trump ate humble pie about the -sacrifice of British troops in Afghanistan, having previously claimed Nato forces avoided the front line. ‘We enjoyed it for a few minutes,’ a close aide recalled. Eleven minutes, to be precise. At 5 p.m. on the dot, Andy Burnham announced that he wished to stand in the Gorton and Denton by-election. So began the latest psychodrama at the top of the party. This was an open challenge to Starmer’s authority and a test both of his remaining political power and his willingness to use it.

Police must investigate every theft. This is the message from the Home Secretary as the government heralds an agreement from all 43 police forces in England and Wales to follow up on any evidence where there is a ‘reasonable line of enquiry’. In practice, that means the police should investigate low-level crimes such as stolen bikes, phones and shoplifting when there is reasonable lead such as a GPS tracker, CCTV footage or a doorbell video. As I noted earlier this month in a cover piece for the magazine, ‘investigate every crime’ doesn’t sound like a particularly novel concept. It raises the question: Why weren’t police investigating every theft? Over the past few years, forces – including the Metropolitan Police – have largely given up on low-level crime.

Who is the busiest politician at Labour conference? One could be forgiven for assuming it would be Keir Starmer. But Andy Burnham is giving the Labour leader a run for his money.  The mayor for Greater Manchester is down to speak at 11 fringe events in total – after missing out on a slot on the main stage. On Sunday, he kicked off his busy conference schedule with a BBC interview in which he said it was the wrong time for Starmer to try to change party rules. Burnham urged the Labour leadership to finally set out a compelling vision to the public.

As leader of the SNP, Nicola Sturgeon has earned a reputation for rallying against what she argues is an arrogant Westminster elite which rides roughshod over Scots. It appears now though that the Scottish First Minister might be getting a taste of her own medicine. This week, she has ended up in a fierce war of words with the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, after the Scottish government unilaterally introduced a travel ban on Manchester and Salford. On Friday, Sturgeon announced without warning that travel between the two North West areas and Scotland would be forbidden from Sunday, due to rising concerns about the Indian (or Delta) variant. Travel had already been suspended between Scotland and Blackburn, Darwen and Bolton.

The Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andrew Burnham, has publicly criticised a judge, calling his decision to end a criminal trial on legal grounds a ‘disgrace’. The judge is Mr Justice William Davis, a highly respected ‘red judge’ — that is the top level of judge we have who do trials. They are the best we have. There are 105 in our country. https://twitter.com/AndyBurnhamGM/status/1397494524054810629?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw This is an attack on the judiciary and the independence of judges. But what you think of people who do such things reveals much about your politics. The charitable argument is that Mr Burnham is confused. That is no insult, the legal system is confusing — I am not an expert on crime, for example.

There are few things so perilous for an under-performing opposition leader as the emergence of a 'king over the water'. This is typically someone who is a member of the same party with an impressive track record but who isn’t currently in the Commons and is therefore not subject to the patronage wielded by the leader. As the leader flails, the king over the water is deemed to have acquired miraculous powers. Each new poll recording the leader’s unpopularity launches a thousand new daydreams among party members fondly imagining how the king over the water would reshape things in ways they yearn for. Keir Starmer is now faced with just such an entity in the shape of the Manchester Metro Mayor Andy Burnham, the biggest Labour winner in the recent elections.

Of all the people who should carry the can for Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour party, Andy Burnham doesn’t get his fair share of the stick. It was, after all, Burnham’s fear of being the most left-wing candidate in the 2015 leadership contest that led to Corbyn being 'loaned' enough MPs' votes to get Dear Jeremy on the ballot. Despite this fact, Burnham felt no shame in saying in an interview this weekend that, ‘I still think life would have been different if I had won in 2015’, as if he hadn’t been his own worst enemy in denying that victory from taking place.

As Keir Starmer spends the weekend working out how exactly to bounce back from disappointing results for his party in the local elections, not every Labour politician is down and out. Step forward Andy Burnham. The Greater Manchester mayor has this afternoon been re-elected with an impressive 67.3 per cent of the vote. In his victory speech on hearing the news, Burnham appeared close to tears as he thanked his family for their support and called for more devolution in England.  But it's another part of Burnham's speech that's likely to set the cat among the pigeons. The former Labour MP used his speech to offer advice on devolution, not just to the Prime Minister but to 'all Westminster parties'.

My weekend plans have been ruined by Matt Hancock. The government has announced new lockdown restrictions for over four million people – banning separate households from meeting indoors – in Greater Manchester (where I live) along with parts of Lancashire and West Yorkshire. What does that mean in practice? When announcing the lockdown on Thursday evening, the Health Secretary tweeted that ‘people from different households will not be allowed to meet each other indoors’, which sounds pretty rudimentary. But would this mean we go back to working from home; that spaces like pubs and restaurants would be closed even if you only visit with your household; could a cleaner come around? No one in Greater Manchester knew.