Andy burnham

“I’m the change candidate,” said Andy Burnham, settling down to the consolidation phase of his leadership bid. Chuka Umunna is out, so he is now the bookies’ favourite. He faces a conundrum: the brains of Labour want to tack to the centre, the money (ie, the unions) want to keep it to the left. So how can he keep both happy? Andrew Marr this morning asked Burnham if he was happy to be the union candidate. “I’m the unifying candidate,” he said. He admitted that he has spoken to Unite’s Len McClusky – the union Godfather - but only as part of his attempt to “build support from all parts of the Labour Party.” And Charlie Falconer, Blair’s ex-flatmate, is backing him – so surely that’s enough?

Labour is in a more difficult position now than it was after its defeat in 1992. In ’92, the electorate had sent Labour a clear message: move to the centre, don’t say you’ll put up taxes and get a better leader. But this time round, the message Labour has been sent is more complicated. There are three groups of voters that Labour failed with at this election, I argue in the magazine this week. Aspirational voters who went Tory, the left behind working class who went Ukip in England and SNP in Scotland and Nationalist-minded ones north of the border. What the Labour leadership candidates have to explain is how they would win these voters over.

Today’s health election debate on the BBC just now was one of the feistiest we have seen in this campaign. Andy Burnham, Jeremy Hunt and Norman Lamb clashed repeatedly — and passionately — over Mid Staffs and the appropriate role for the private sector in the NHS. Burnham was on hectoring form throughout the debate. But he struggled so badly to answer Andrew Neil’s questions about Mid Staffs that one was left feeling he’ll never be able to win a Labour leadership contest until he has a proper answer to these questions.

Has Andy Burnham really reinvented himself to prepare for a future leadership bid? In this week’s Spectator, I interviewed the Shadow Health Secretary about his rather forthright views on the NHS: views that some suspect have conveniently changed in order to appeal to Labour’s base. You can read the interview here, but for Coffee House readers, here are some extended quotes from our discussion. Burnham was insistent that his views on the health service today are the ones he put into practice when he was Health Secretary under the last Labour government. When I asked whether he’d changed politically, he said: ‘Well, there are a couple of ways to answer that.

Time was when Andy Burnham passed for a middle-of-the-road Labourite: he was deemed insufficiently dramatic and impressive to secure much support when he stood for leader five years ago. But these days, his colleagues — and the bookmakers — consider the shadow health secretary the frontrunner in any new contest. At an otherwise funereal Labour conference last year, his speech received standing ovations. In three months’ time, Burnham will either be health secretary or a serious contender for Labour leader. He has already survived calls from within his party to remove him from the health brief, though he claims Miliband has never raised the prospect.

Andy Burnham’s interview in The Times today lays down several markers. He praises Len McCluskey, declares that trade union funding is best for Labour, slates Alan Milburn, criticises Peter Mandelson for being relaxed about people getting filthy rich and distances himself from the Blairite mantra that ‘what matters is what works.’ It will, to put it mildly, do nothing to discourage speculation that he is preparing to run for the leadership on a left-wing ticket if Labour loses the election. To be fair, Burnham is frank in this interview that he has changed his mind on various subjects. As he puts it, 'There was a period in the 80s and 90s and the first decade of this century when people said the market has the answer to everything and I honestly don’t think it has .

With the opinion polls so tight at the moment, we’re having to look for other ways to try and work out what the general election result will be. One indicator worth watching is which party is spending more time thinking about the leadership contest that would follow an election. Now, there has been plenty of speculation about this on both the Tory and Labour benches in recent times. But in the last few weeks, I’ve picked up more of it from the Labour side. One Labour frontbencher calculates that the focus of ‘half the party is on what happens next’.

Ubiquitous Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham has had to admit that he 'spent' £25,000 in a disastrous and embarrassing threat to sue his counterpart Jeremy Hunt. Burnham has had to declare donations in kind of £16,665 worth of legal services offered by Steel & Shamash, the Labour Party's solicitors, and £8,250 from Gavin Millar QC, a barrister who specialises in defamation proceedings. Students of North London Labour Kremlinology will be aware that Millar is the brother of Fiona Millar, the left-wing agitator and partner of Alastair Campbell. He was last seen taking down Tory MP Andrew Mitchell in the High Court.

Oh, I see. So it’s my fault. There I was, thinking that the general swamping and near collapse of accident and emergency services in hospitals across Britain might be the result of, you know, some sort of systemic problem within the NHS. With me, a mere member of the public, just being an occasional victim. But no! Apparently it’s all because I took my wailing two-year-old daughter in, one Sunday afternoon last year, to get some antibiotics for her ear. This is good to know. For, had I not been told that all this was the fault of chumps such as me heading to such places for the sorts of trivial ailments better treated by a traditional family doctor, I might in my ignorance have been inclined to blame other people.

Andy Burnham has put in a request for an urgent question on the A&E crisis, I have learned. The question, which the Speaker has yet to decide whether or not to grant, is as follows: URGENT QUESTION Rt Hon Andy Burnham MP To ask the Secretary of State for Health if he will make a statement on the major incidents that have been declared at a number of hospitals and on A&E performance in England. This might seem rather unsurprising at first glance, and it would be on any other day of the week. Today Ed Miliband will face David Cameron at PMQs and as I blogged earlier, it would be extremely odd if he didn’t use his questions to the Prime Minister to ask about the NHS.

Ed Miliband today promised that Labour will offer ‘hope, not falsehood’ in its General Election campaign. It’s a bold pledge given the party is making so much of the claim that the Tories want to reduce public spending to levels not seen since the 1930s - a claim that has foundations made of something oddly similar to sand. Similarly the Tories have today produced an interesting dossier that Miliband’s party has interestingly called ‘dodgy’ because it contains a number of ‘assumptions’. As James explains, that’s part of the plan, as Labour now has to say which cuts it wouldn’t reverse and which it would.

There’s an irony about Ukip’s rise. Nigel Farage party’s popularity is driven by a widespread sense that the main parties are all the same. Yet in the past four years, the differences between the Labour party and the Conservatives have grown substantially, on issues from the size of the state to an EU referendum. In an election year you might expect parties to converge in the centre ground as they chased swing voters. It won’t happen this time. Labour is determined to stop left-wingers defecting to the SNP and the Greens, while the Tories, who have long had their own issue on the right because of Ukip, believe that their best chance of victory comes from heightening the contrast between them and the other parties.

Lately there's been a lot of talk about the 'P' word: privatisation. Ed Miliband's team hasn't done the hard policy work to revitalise Labour as a party of government, and it is beginning to show. His platform for next May has a lot of sticky plaster policies, but very little that addresses structural problems like the housing market and transport costs, to name two issues close to my heart. Instead, catnip like 'no privatisation of our NHS' and 'reversing the privatisation of the railways' is being wheeled out to fill the Left's policy void. This conveniently ignores the Blair and Brown government's enthusiasm for market – rather than state – solutions.