Andy burnham

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Andy Burnham’s centrist act isn’t fooling anyone

When Ed Miliband and Shabana Mahmood arrived in Downing Street on Monday afternoon, the image of political rivals arm in arm symbolised a new government of differing views taking shape. It might have been more awkward. As they neared the door of No. 10 and the waiting television cameras, Miliband turned to Mahmood and asked: ‘Should we turn around for a photo together?’ Mahmood gave the idea short shrift: ‘We’re not getting married, Ed!’ But in a sense Labour is seeking a new relationship with the British public and everyone around Andy Burnham is alive to the importance of images, symbols and vibes. As Wes Streeting, the new Defence Secretary, put it in cabinet on Tuesday: ‘We have a second chance to make a first impression with the voters.

The Spectator

Burnham is already drifting towards defeat

Nothing so became Keir Starmer’s premiership as his leaving of it. Farewell remarks outside Downing Street, unpunctuated by the odious Steve Bray; a brief goodbye in Buckingham Palace, before the King welcomed his fourth new prime minister in four years; then to the pub to drown his sorrows with Rachel Reeves, leaving Andy Burnham and John Healey to pick up the national tab. There is an irony to Healey’s appointment as Chancellor. Burnham blames Margaret Thatcher for so many of the country’s ills but her time in office was devoted to clearing up the dreadful inheritance left by the last Healey at the Treasury: a top rate of income tax at 98 per cent, untamed inflation, union disarray, socialist sclerosis. Rather than take a wrong turn in the 1980s, Britain flourished.

Charles Moore

Burnham’s solutions must not lie in the 1970s

Andy Burnham is right. The cost of living is foremost in people’s minds just now. Naturally his electricity bill VAT holiday and freeze of bus fares find agreement in television news vox pops and focus groups. But he offers no explanation for the causes and concentrates only on the symptoms. Obviously, the removal of the 5 per cent VAT will be nice for consumers. But underlying inflation today relates to government debauchery of money and disruptions of supply caused by Trump’s tariffs and his short war, by Putin’s long war and Ed Miliband’s net-zero trap, which makes us pay expensive green levies and bans new domestic fossil fuel production. The remedy does not lie in the 1970s-style pretence that things can be made cheaper by fiat.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Burnham becomes PM, America strikes Iran and Spain wins World Cup 

Home The King accepted Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation as Prime Minister and asked Andy Burnham to form an administration. In Downing Street, he made a short speech without notes, saying that his first instruction would be to end rough sleeping. He invited President Donald Trump to Manchester. He also spoke to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and President Emmanuel Macron of France. He promised a ‘cost of living government’, and removed VAT from domestic energy bills for six months from October, giving an average saving of 86p a week. Bus fares in England would be capped at £2 from 2027. Mr Burnham appointed a cabinet of 12 women and 11 men, gunning for Starmer loyalists.

Peter Jones

The modern hysteria about hysteria

The McKinsey Institute says that health outcomes for women are less successful than those for men, and it has been argued that men should take a greater interest in the problem. We have names of about 50 female doctors from the ancient world, and one wonders what they made of the male theorists’ views of their bodies. Health in the ancient world was understood to depend upon the balance of the four ‘humours’ (liquids) inside the body: yellow bile (vomit), black bile (from the spleen and liver), phlegm and blood. Having no idea what the purpose of menstruation was, doctors argued that women’s soft and spongy bodies tended to corrupt their blood, which the body very sensibly expelled every month.

Monday

Jawad Iqbal

Andy Burnham’s good vibes just won’t cut it

Andy Burnham became Britain's Prime Minister today – the seventh leader of the country in the last decade. It is a case of all hail the new messiah, who promises to build “a new politics” (the eternal empty vow of every politician when taking power), but this time with a shiny new twist. Burnham, who oozes a desperate desire to be liked, will lead a government focused on good vibes and the fantasy of a mythical Labour paradise lost, rather than anything grounded in the harsh political realities of today. His approach to power boils down to trusting his instincts (those vibes, again), based on the delusion that he has a special connection with ordinary voters.

united kingdom
Sam Matthews Boehmer

Oasis are the World Cup’s real champions

In the regretful days that followed England’s World Cup exit last week, a video was played on repeat on social media. Someone had edited red and white into greyscale over a clip of England’s footballers linking arms and swaying, singing along to Oasis’s ‘Wonderwall’.  At this tournament it became a tradition. England won a game, then a few more. The pundits finally fell silent. Ian Wright or Gary Neville whispered: ‘Drink it in.’ That famous guitar started up; the camera panned along the players’ line. We all knew the opening words: ‘Today is gonna be the day…’ No more ‘Sweet Caroline’. ‘Three Lions’ was played but the crowd only cursorily joined in.

Sunday

James Heale

Burnham is trying to do a Brown

Tomorrow, Andy Burnham will become Britain’s 59th Prime Minister. The team around him has been strikingly circumspect when it comes to setting out his plans. But this weekend we are starting to get some smoke signals via the Sunday papers. The new PM will back licences for drilling at the Rosebank and Jackdaw gas fields. Thames Water, Britain’s largest water supplier, is likely to be placed in special measures over £18bn owed to creditors. Plans for digital ID and the abolition of jury trials will be scrapped, with the post of AI minister upgraded to cabinet rank. Around a third of the cabinet are expected to be sacked and the Departments for Business and Technology overhauled too.

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

Andy Burnham can’t afford to please everyone

Andy Burnham thinks his critics need a new joke about him. The old one about a Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite walking into a bar (‘Hello, Mr Burnham,’ says the barman) is about to be eclipsed. On Monday, it won’t be a barman offering good wishes – it will be the Cabinet Secretary, Antonia Romeo, when Burnham walks into No. 10 as Britain’s 59th prime minister. Before that, on Friday, Burnham will accept the leadership of the Labour party, unopposed, at the headquarters of the Trades Union Congress. The speech he will give is still being worked on, but Burnham is ‘holding the pen himself’, aides say.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Burnham’s triumph, the IRGC proscribed and babies called Andrew 

Home Police launched a murder inquiry into the death of Ann Widdecombe, the former MP, aged 78. Her body was found with head wounds at her house on Dartmoor. They arrested a 28-year-old white British man in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. Counter-terrorism police took over the investigation two days later and rearrested the suspect on suspicion of commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism. Police called it a ‘targeted’ attack. She had been a minister in Sir John Major’s administration, an MEP for the Brexit Party and, since 2023, a member of Reform, serving as its immigration and justice spokesman.

Macron Starmer
Gavin Mortimer

Europe’s centrists are falling one by one

Few in France will have been as devastated by their team’s defeat in last night’s World Cup semi-final as Emmanuel Macron. The president put on a brave face, tweeting his congratulations to Spain and thanking the French team "for carrying our colors with commitment." But how Macron must have dreamed of a French World Cup triumph in Sunday’s final. He would have been in New Jersey – as he was in Moscow in 2018 when the Bleus won the World Cup –dancing a jig as his bête noire, Donald Trump, presented the trophy to his boys. Macron's presidency is ending with a whimper In a sense the French football team are a metaphor for Macron’s presidency.

The Spectator

Letters: bring on devolution

The right kind of devolution Sir: Your leading article ‘The Burnham Question’ (11 July) suggests that the putative prime minister’s enthusiasm for devolution might be a good thing, provided that it is the right kind of devolution. Although Andy Burnham would never admit it, devolution of the Manchester and Teesside type succeeds because, in both cases, business is given the chance to thrive. By contrast, devolution to the Scottish parliament and Senedd has stifled economic growth, while providing a platform for nationalist politicians to bash the UK. A true believer in effective devolution would scrap these national institutions and transfer power to business-friendly bodies in cities and regions across the UK.

Martin Vander Weyer

Count Binface has shown Burnham how to make a manifesto

Count Binface’s manifesto, made for Makerfield and tweaked for Clacton, is a rare point of light in today’s Stygian political landscape. Could there be a more concise satirical takedown than ‘I will cut your taxes and raise everyone else’s’ or a sharper transport policy than ‘Wifi on trains that works; also trains that work’? This weekend offers a last chance for mischief-makers to suggest a matching agenda for Andy Burnham, before the real ragbag of inner-Labour compromise is unveiled over the coming weeks. Here’s my four-point contribution. First, don’t nationalise anything, not even Thames Water.

Wednesday

Alex Morton

Andy Burnham is Britain’s Biden

Watching Andy Burnham in Manchester, dressed in his T-shirt and jacket and pronouncing the return of a more old-fashioned, pro-worker left, I had a sense of déjà vu. I had seen this movie before, but with different accents. For the politician Burnham obviously resembles is not British at all – it is Joe Biden. Just like Biden, Andy Burnham’s self-image is based on the idea that those on the left are the tribunes of ordinary working people, not progressive elites. Like Joe Biden, Andy Burnham is a provincial throwback to an earlier time, just from the North West, not the Midwest. Just like Biden, Burnham rails against the "neoliberal" changes of the 1980s, which he blames for the economic problems of today.

andy burnham
James Heale

Labour politicians make the pilgrimage to St Andy

Warm wine, small talk and curling canapés have long defined the Westminster summer scene. But regime change has added a certain frisson to the party circuit this year. As many of Labour’s finest toasted America’s semiquincentennial at the US ambassador’s house last week, the hostility radiating from Keir Starmer’s No. 10 team was unmistakable. ‘I’ve had them shooting daggers at me all night,’ complained one rebel MP, amid toasts to the revolution. ‘It’s over guys, you lost.’ As fireworks exploded overhead, another added: ‘The king is dead, long live the king.’ The Prime Minister’s decision to step down, paving the way for Andy Burnham’s coronation, has spared his party plenty of pyrotechnics.

Charles Moore

Prince Harry and Nigel Farage have more in common than they might like to admit

At about 2 p.m. on Tuesday, two cases with a common characteristic coincided. One was Nigel Farage’s long statement about why he would resign his seat to fight a by-election. The other was the defeat of the privacy action against the Daily Mail brought by Prince Harry and others. The link is not in content, but in attitude. In both cases, the main actors in the drama are paranoid and solipsistic. Mr Farage, trying to deflect questions about the men who give him money, spoke for about 20 minutes of the wrongs done him by the ‘Establishment’ and the media. He was particularly worked up about his security. The Prince’s case was that he had been intruded upon by dark and powerful media forces. It was all mixed up with his resentments against his father the King and his courtiers.

The Spectator

Beware Andy Burnham’s ‘devolution revolution’

Andy Burnham is a lucky politician. And Nigel Farage has just given him another piece of surprising good fortune. The Reform leader’s decision to call a by-election so his voters can express their preference for him over a comedian in a dustbin is more than just a narcissistic farce: it is a blessing for Project Burnham. Just as attention should be focused on a man with neither a mandate nor a manifesto for running the nation, Westminster’s gaze is directed once more to the dreary beachfronts of Jaywick and Frinton. Burnham’s unscrutinised, unelected, unready administration moves closer to power while Reform achieves a feat hitherto thought impossible: becoming even more of a vehicle for the ego of its leader.

Oliver Shah

London’s slump won’t last

I left the Sunday Times a year ago to create a CEO reputation advisory firm. Sir Philip Green, the former retail tycoon with whom I fought a running battle, apparently rang a mutual friend and said: ‘I hear he’s going into PR – he should try adding ICK to that.’ More constructive advice came from a property entrepreneur, who told me that my emotional and financial volatility was about to be ‘massively heightened’. That turned out to be very true. When the methadone of your final PAYE payslip cuts out, reality kicks in. But winning clients, and looking after them, is amazingly rewarding. And even when you have a bad day, it’s your bad day. Newcome Advisory celebrated its first birthday last week.

Peter Jones

Lessons in oratory for Andy Burnham

A Mr Burnham, A.M. (Andrew Murray) fancies being PM and Labour MPs have decided to humour him. Needing to assert what a democratic triumph this is, they will welcome ideas from Menander, the ancient Greek orator. Menander would suggest starting their acclaim as follows: ‘With favourable omens have you come to us, as splendid as a bright day of sunshine, appearing to us from on high. A welcome report announced your auspicious arrival and the good fortune that your subjects had fervently prayed for.’  MPs should then explain why he is needed, not slandering the previous leader but suggesting the subjects were unhappy, and go on: ‘Just as if night and darkness had held the world in its grip, you appeared like the sun to our eyes and scattered all our hardships at once.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Burnham’s unwillingness to face the media should worry us all

There are so many hopes invested in Andy Burnham’s premiership that disappointment is inevitable. In some cases, it is also desirable. The member for Makerfield has been co-opted by Labour’s soft left and communitarian right for their respective agendas. To govern will be to choose. But a particularly poisoned chalice has been proffered to the next prime minister, one he should dash from his lips. Of all the figures on the left who made the pilgrimage to Makerfield to campaign, the presence of Hugh Grant was most ominous. Perhaps the actor who played the prime minister in Love Actually with such élan was there to school our would-be premier on how to deal with obstreperous American presidents. But Hugh Grant is not just a more metrosexual Cary Grant.