Isabel Hardman

Andy Burnham was already notorious before he became Prime Minister for flip-flopping, but what was less obvious until recently was how much that flip-flopping is caused by his habit of shooting from the hip initially. He says something on the spur of the moment, then finds himself having to row back because it turns out that once you're in Downing Street, everyone pays attention to your every word. He spent the end of this week insisting that he was absolutely clear on Scottish independence, having been anything but earlier in the autumn.

British healthcare moves in pendulum swings between one extreme and another, often without much material improvement for patients. Just look at how maternity care swung from mostly at home and assisted by midwives before the start of the NHS, to highly-medicalised and doctor-led by the 1960s, and back to a focus on ‘normal birth’ and reducing caesarean rates in more recent years. Very little of that has really helped the women and babies at the centre of the debate. The same is true in mental health, where we have swung from institutionalisation to care in the community without proper resourcing for either, and from stigma and silence to social normalisation, all without many material improvements for the people suffering from severe conditions.

Remember NHS waiting lists? They used to be a political priority for the Labour government, which would claim it was meeting its targets on getting the length of the lists and the amount of time patients were waiting down. Strangely, that chat has all but disappeared lately. Today’s waiting list data from NHS England underlines why. The number of people waiting for elective treatment on the NHS has gone up for a second month running, this time to 7.37 million treatments at the end of August. It’s the highest since October 2025, and the health service’s national medical director Professor Frankie Swords has warned that there are ‘ominous signs of early pressure’ ahead of the traditional winter high demand that the health service experiences.

Why has Andy Burnham delayed the publication of Alan Milburn’s review into Neets until after the Budget? The review is something the Prime Minister and his Labour colleagues cite repeatedly as evidence that they are taking the problem of youth unemployment seriously – and yet they seem not to want to take it seriously enough to actually publish the document. It’s almost as if its main purpose is to exist as a future prospect, rather than a real, physical report that would require action from ministers. Much of politics today exists in this illusion of action trap, where the mere existence of a report, royal commission or public inquiry allows leaders to kid themselves and others that they are taking an issue seriously.

This year’s Conservative party conference contains a number of examples of a party having some genuinely original thoughts, rather than just running along the same tramlines as everyone else. The Bayeux Tapestry parody that the party has produced in order to attack its opponents is striking because it is a much more creative attack job than the usual amusing mugs, beers and T-shirts that you can normally pick up at a conference. On a much more serious level, Kemi Badenoch’s The Right Way pamphlet is an attempt to show the leader’s working on the big issues facing the country, rather than simply presenting a suite of policies as a fait accompli.

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’.