Isabel Hardman

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?

We are starting to see a pattern in the announcements that Andy Burnham has made over his first few weeks as Prime Minister. He makes a promise that’s full of belief and righteousness, and then has to follow that up with a policy where the detail contains an admission that he hadn’t fully thought this one through.  Most notably, we’ve had the ‘end rough sleeping' pledge, which, on contact with reality, turned into a plan for everyone to get a ‘route out of rough sleeping by Christmas’. This week, we saw the difference between Burnham's argument that new affordable housing funding should be 'dedicated to council housing', and the reality.

Are mental health centres in libraries, banks and high street locations really going to make much of a difference? Health Secretary Yvette Cooper has unveiled the new facilities today with a £343 million funding package and a claim that this is ‘the biggest redesign of mental health services in a generation’. In any other healthcare setting, that would be a pretty bold claim to make, but instead it just underlines how little work there has been on making mental health services work within the wider NHS.

Andy Burnham is apparently enjoying his first taste of unpopularity as prime minister, in the form of the furore over the early release of domestic abusers and the killers of PC Andrew Harper. The Prime Minister made his frustration at the limitations of his situation clear yesterday with a lengthy post on X where he said he wanted to go further in restricting eligibility for early release, but couldn’t. In reality, though, this is a very mild taste for Burnham of the difficulties he will really face: more of a whiff of unpopularity rather than anything that will linger in the mouth.

Andy Burnham knows that ‘fixing’ social care will drain political capital away from him faster than a teenager emptying their parents’ bank account. At the moment, he is clearly more focused on funding mechanisms to put the sector on a sustainable footing and the way in which it will or won’t be enmeshed with the NHS. But there’s another longer-term drain on his – or any future prime minister's – capital too, which is the quality of care that’s available. The debate has understandably been focused on the financial aspect, but, for a long time, we have not had an open discussion of what adult social care should actually be like for the people in the system.

To the surprise of very few in Scottish politics, bar apparently himself, Anas Sarwar is stepping down as leader of the Scottish Labour party to take up a peerage and serve as a minister in Andy Burnham's government. Sarwar had ruled out this prospect himself during the Holyrood election campaign, but now that he's past the painful result that Labour got in May, he's off for the new life he said he didn't want.  Sarwar was, of course, the first senior Labour figure to call for Keir Starmer to step down – he held a press conference back in February telling the then prime minister that 'the distraction needs to end, and the leadership in Downing Street needs to change'.

Andy Burnham told his Cabinet this morning that they need to give people a ‘sense that help is coming’. He was largely focused on the cost of living as he addressed ministers, but one of his other big themes in the past 24 hours since taking over as prime minister has been moving power out of Westminster and ‘into every postcode in the land’. It’s the kind of pitch that most new PMs make before they start to realise the limits of their own power, and wonder whether they want to let go of any more of it in the way they’d initially suggested. Burnham is coming into government at a time when the British state seems pretty powerless.

What does Yvette Cooper as Health Secretary mean for the NHS? It's a question no one thought to ask before today, which underlines why her appointment is quite left-field. Cooper does have experience: she was a junior minister in the health department back in the very early days of the Blair government and was part of the team that implemented the Sure Start programme. But it's been a while since those days, and Cooper hasn't talked that much about health since. Like her new boss, Cooper pledged to integrate health and social care when she and Andy Burnham were candidates in the 2015 Labour leadership election. Beyond that, we just have to go on how she has conducted herself as a minister.

Keir Starmer has been quite an irritable – and irritating at times – performer in the Commons as prime minister. His sessions with Kemi Badenoch in particular have been marked by pompous lectures about how she should be conducting Prime Minister's Questions, along with lofty comments about the ‘spirit in which’ the opposition has been behaving. Starmer hasn't seen anything wrong with this attitude because he made the fatal mistake early on of buying his own hype about what a committed and decent public servant he is, rather than being anxious about whether he was actually meeting his own standards. This means that he seems genuinely appalled by any question that suggests he is in fact not meeting those standards.