Isabel Hardman

Andy Burnham gave Labour activists fire in their bellies at the Labour party conference this week, showing them emotion and a sense of purpose that they’ve not really seen from a party leader in a good while. Tory party leader Kemi Badenoch won’t respond with a similar level of emotion: that’s just not how she’s built as a person. As she says to Tim in this week's magazine, she wants to be ‘the person saying “No”’, the people displeaser. It won’t just be a battle of ideas in politics this autumn, but also a battle of behaviour. But for every bit of energy that Burnham has given his party, he is still going into the autumn with the big, urgent questions unanswered. How is he really going to fund defence? How does he really propose to cut welfare?

Normally when politicians really cry, it’s because they’re on their way out of a big job, rather than just getting settled. Today, Andy Burnham cried on stage at the Labour conference as he explained what he wanted to do and why he wanted to do it. He was talking about his father Roy, who died earlier this month. He told the conference hall that on the day of his father’s death, John Swinney had said that Burnham would be the last prime minister of the United Kingdom. He suspected that the First Minister of Scotland hadn’t yet heard the news of his bereavement, he added, but ‘I want you to know how it made me feel – utterly determined to prove him wrong’.

The meltdown in the criminal justice system has been particularly egregious for victims of rape and sexual violence. They have been forced to wait years for their cases to come to trial, which means they have very little prospect of being able to recover fully from the trauma in the meantime. Their memories are also affected by the passing of time, which doesn't serve them or the wider principle of justice at all, given it undermines the quality of the evidence being heard when the case does eventually reach a court room.

Would renaming the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero really make it easier for the government to persuade the public of the benefits of net zero? The select committee with the same name seems to think so, warning in a new report that the current messaging on the energy transition at the moment is ‘overly technical’ and that the ‘term net zero has lost much of its significant positive association’. The cross-party committee of MPs, chaired by Labour’s Bill Esterson, adds: ‘It increasingly acts as a distraction from the broader aims of the energy transition and as a lightning rod for opposition to climate action.

Andy Burnham repeatedly claims that he can fund defence using savings from the welfare budget – just not the ‘crude cuts’ that the Tories want him to make. But today his own adviser on youth unemployment has rather undermined that: Alan Milburn has confirmed to the Financial Times that the plans he has for Neets will cost more money upfront and take time to produce savings. ‘Honestly, in order to fix this, if we’re going to get to anywhere near the [Neet] levels of Holland or even Belgium, that that is not going to happen in two or three years,’ he said. He added: ‘If we’re going to put in more support for young people… of course we’re going to have to invest behind that’.

There are a lot of things we know about NHS maternity: that it’s in crisis, that there are a lot of reports confirming that it is in crisis, that there are even more recommendations from those reports on how to end that crisis, and that despite all that, very little has yet changed on maternity wards. The topic came up again at Prime Minister’s Questions today, with Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey asking for a second week running about a troubled maternity unit. Last week, it was North Devon’s maternity ward, which remains closed. This week, he asked about Musgrove Park in Taunton, which Baroness Amos recently described as ‘the most challenging maternity estate in the country, including leaking roofs, poles propping up a ceiling and dangerous room temperatures’.

A few years ago, it would have been unthinkable for a Labour frontbencher to use a statement about the kind of unrest seen in Dover and Portsmouth over the weekend to talk about the ‘valid concerns’ that people have about immigration. That the Policing Minister Sarah Jones did that today shows how far the debate has moved: Labour knows that it cannot lump everyone who is angry about the scale of illegal immigration into the same ‘racist’ bucket. She made clear in the first few minutes of her statement to MPs this afternoon that ‘there can be no excuse for threatening behaviour or serious disruption’, and that ‘this government condemns the intimidating and thuggish behaviour shown by some of the protesters this weekend’.

Can Andy Burnham really delay setting out how he will raise defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP by 2030 until next year’s spending review? The first hostile Labour question that he received at his first Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday came from Tan Dhesi, the Labour MP who chairs the defence select committee. Dhesi’s argument was that ‘vibes alone just will not be enough’ and that the Prime Minister was ‘kicking the can down the road’ by ‘waiting for a fiscal event in a future year’. It is, though, not one being made by a critical mass of Labour MPs, and that is presumably why Burnham feels more comfortable with a bit of can-kicking.

Victims will start receiving letters from today informing them that they will be affected by the early release of prisoners, after Andy Burnham confirmed that those convicted of manslaughter will be exempt from the scheme. The Prime Minister had been responding largely to the outcry over the potential release of two of the killers of PC Andrew Harper. While those two men should remain behind bars, Burnham’s solution has left the prisons system in an even more precarious position. This is always the risk when politicians make policy because of an emotional reaction: they can end up skewing the system in a way that has quite profound consequences elsewhere. In this case, though, there are profound consequences whether prisoners are released early or kept inside.

Is Andy Burnham running a ‘circuit breaker’ government from the one led by Keir Starmer, or is it a ‘continuity’ administration? Chancellor John Healey seems to think it’s the latter, telling Sky News that: ‘This Labour government has been a government of change for the last two years. We now step that up with Andy Burnham as leader. We’re a continuity of a Labour government with a change of leader, looking to see growth in every postcode, give people just a little bit of breathing space, whether they’re in households or businesses, but above all to see growth, hope and some future for all parts of this country.’ What does that word salad really mean?