Tim Shipman

Kemi Badenoch, like many in the Labour party, is not sorry to see the back of Keir Starmer. ‘I did not find Starmer an interesting person,’ she says. ‘He never said anything interesting.’ Andy Burnham is a different proposition. ‘Quite interesting,’ she thinks. ‘He has more of a clear sense of who he is politically, which makes him more confident in terms of what he wants to do. But who he is politically is so far removed from who I am politically that I think that there’s a sharper contrast between us.’ We speak in her office in Portcullis House with the Labour conference in full cry in Liverpool. ‘It feels very much like student union people who’ve got older, but they still want to do the stuff that they did in the student union,’ Badenoch says.

1) He’s the most effective speaker we’ve had in a PM for years I’ve been attending party conferences since 2001 and in that time I’ve heard around 70 leaders’ speeches from all the parties. This was one of the most important and defining – I expect it will remain among the half-dozen most memorable. It was big on heart, rather than brain, at times hugely emotional and strangely moving as Burnham became overcome when discussing the recent death of his father. This was both big and bold and nostalgic but also intimate, quiet, drawing you in, gently elegiac for what has been lost in a way you could appreciate (even if you don’t accept Burnham’s diagnosis of what has gone wrong). I judge speeches on ‘the tingle factor’, whether I get that prickle up my spine.

Andy Burnham has just ruled out a general election next May. As I wrote in my cover story this week, there are a lot of people at the top of Labour thinking about going to the country but – as I and most of my sources concluded – the polling numbers are just not there and the only meaningful policy freedom the PM would gain would be the ability to put up personal taxation. ‘He’ll raise your taxes to pay for migrants and benefit claimants’ looks like the easiest ‘No’ campaign slogan since ‘Take Back Control’. The Prime Minister argued that calling a snap election would leave the country ‘arguing again amongst ourselves’ Party conferences are never much fun for prime ministers.

On 1 September, Andy Burnham gathered Labour MPs in No. 10 for a rousing speech. ‘We are a fighting force,’ he said. ‘We can win the next election. We have an opportunity now. We’ve got the initiative.’ Some of those present wondered if this was the Prime Minister rolling the pitch for an early election. One MP recalls a comment by Burnham in a smaller group that night: ‘We’ll hopefully see some of you back after the election. Er, most of you!’ Downing Street is adamant the PM would say no such thing, even as a joke. A party adviser accused the source of ‘trouble making’. Burnham’s senior aides deny there is any prospect of an early election. ‘Not going to happen,’ says one. A senior figure in No.

It’s hard to keep up with what might kill us first. A week ago, the tech-bros were competing to tell us that AI might wipe out humanity within a decade. This week, most of Europe seems to be warning about a Russian unconventional attack on the West. French President Emmanuel Macron today called a meeting of all the political leaders in France to share intelligence assessments of Vladimir Putin’s posture and what appear to be growing aggression from the Moscow machine. Burnham may not be interested in foreign policy, but as legions of previous prime ministers have discovered, it has a way of becoming interested in them 'In recent weeks, the Russian hybrid threat against Europeans and against France has intensified,' he said.

When Andy Burnham was quizzed at PMQs last week about his and Ed Miliband’s decision to sanction the Israeli government over its handling of Gaza, the Prime Minister was surprisingly frank about the trade-offs. He presented it as a decision to prevent ‘the collapse of the two-state solution’ for a peace deal in the Middle East, which he claimed was ‘dying before our eyes’. In his statement to the Commons, Miliband referred to ‘ethnic cleansing’. But Burnham also admitted: ‘We gave the most careful consideration to… all of the risks. The Foreign Secretary and I took close advice from the security services and, of course, officials in the Foreign Office and in our embassies.

We’re still in the dead zone between Reform UK’s conference and the TUC and Lib Dems' next week, with Labour and the Tories to follow. The main government announcement of the week, the decision by Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband to impose sanctions on Israel, seems demonstrably more likely – to put it politely – to deliver victory in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election than it is to deliver a two-state solution to the Middle East wars. It’s worth taking stock at the end of the week about where British politics stands now. I’m grateful to Luke Tryl of More in Common for insights into his latest polling and focus grouping (none of which, he assures me, was paid for by a secret donor).