William Atkinson

Can I shock you? I like Andy Burnham. Not in a gay way. More that, when he comes on the TV, I don’t throw a sock at him. As hard as I try, I can’t bring myself to hate our new Prime Minister. He seems a nice bloke, a committed family man, sincere in his desire to house the homeless, bring the country together, and promote fewer bad things and more good things. I also like the Smiths, cricket, and pubs; if we went for a pint, we’d probably get along. Yet premiers are not judged by their fondness for Scampi Fries. More’s the pity; them's the breaks. An algorithmic parody of what a Northern Prime Minister should be like - Andy Capp with the nuclear code But I do struggle to take Burnham seriously.

Readers, I have been to a few political conferences in my time. But none of them were as empty, miserable, or downright weird as CPAC GB. Having heard that Liz Truss was bringing the American conservative jamboree across the Atlantic, I felt obliged to go, and comforted myself that there would at least be a bar to flee to if it all got too grotesque. But there was no bar. Or at least there wasn't until I discovered the secret pathway from the Intercontinental Hotel that emerged next to the O2's Wetherspoons. Until then, being cursed with vision, hearing and sanity meant enduring an event that made Truss's premiership look like a model of tact and foresight.

Tonight, Erling Haaland and Harry Kane should be playing together, not against each other. Partially because Haaland is a Yorkshireman, born in Leeds, and this Nordic stuff is just an affectation, but also because England and Norway should not be different countries. With our combined control over the North Sea, we’d have fish and oil beyond our wildest dreams Back in 1066, as one is reminded by the big French cloth now sojourning at the British Museum, history took a wrong turning. Harald Hardrada should have bested Harold Godwinson at Stamford Bridge. Had he then stuffed Billie the Conqueror down in Hastings, a millennium of Anglo-Norwegian unity could and should have beckoned.

For those us who dabble in journalism, it is a constant effort to make our prose as engaging, punchy, and robust as our limited vocabularies can manage. It is thus utterly refreshing and deeply imposing to be reminded of how best to do it by a master of their craft. Exhibit A: Paul Dacre’s statement following Prince Harry’s loss in court yesterday. Read it and grin. Dacre and his publications stood for people like us: ordinary suburban Brits ‘There isn’t a laundry in the cosmos big enough to wash all the dirty linen he has aired about his own family’. ‘I feel sorry for the way a confused and angry young man has been drawn into this case’. This ‘trumped-up action’ raises ‘profoundly disturbing questions about the conduct of elements of the legal profession’.

We live in a time of ifs and wills. If Reform and Restore split the right-wing vote in Makerfield, will Andy Burnham win this Thursday’s by-election? If he does re-enter the Commons, will he challenge Keir Starmer for Labour’s leadership? If he does so, will it be a contest or a coronation? If Burnham wins, will he then call an election? And if he does so, will Labour win it? I cannot go inside Burnham’s head; as Lara Brown has highlighted, there isn’t much in it, except the Happy Mondays. But I can read polls. The two hypotheticals that have been done with Burnham give Labour a slim lead. In our current era of multi-party politics, that could be enough to eke out a slim majority or at least to be the largest party in a hung parliament capable of cobbling together a government.

For all of the squabbling between Reform and Restore, the Right’s best chance at a by-election win on 18 June may not be in Makerfield, but 300-odd miles further north – in Aberdeen. The beneficiary wouldn’t be Nigel Farage or Rupert Lowe, but Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives. The Tory candidate is now ‘quietly confident’ It’s unsurprising that this contest has been largely overlooked. My Westminster colleagues treat the suburbs of Manchester as being almost unfathomably distant, so the North Sea coast seems like an alien planet. But Aberdeen is also a city used to being ignored. According to the Centre for Cities, between 2010 and 2020, household incomes in the city fell by almost 7 per cent; between 2010 and 2023, it was one of only two cities in the UK to lose jobs.

The Shetland Islands The SNP have had better weeks. It’s strange to think that it was only this month that the party won a staggering fifth term in office, despite independence being no closer, and a record of failure on everything from education to drug deaths. Perhaps the most remarkable result for the SNP leader John Swinney was the election of Hannah Mary Goodlad in the Shetland Islands. Since 1950, this was the first time these islands had voted for someone other than the Liberals or Lib Dems. Goodlad triumphed after a vigorous campaign featuring windswept social media videos and three visits from Swinney; before her election, she ran an outdoor sauna business.

Plenty of narratives can be pulled out of last Thursday’s elections. Labour’s shattered hold over its Northern and Welsh heartlands; the imperviousness of Scottish voters to the inadequacies of SNP rule; the onward march of Reform; the continuing irrelevance of the Lib Dems; the foaming of the River Tiber heralded by sectarian success. But one that cannot – if you still want to be able to look yourself in the eye in the morning mirror – is that they were good for the Conservatives. Trying to turn these results into a victory only leaves Badenoch looking like Comical Kemi Kemi Badenoch was out in front of the cameras early, surrounded by beaming activists, heralding her party’s success in taking back Westminster from Labour.

I have little interest in what Keir Starmer will say in the Commons later today. I’ve only been in political journalism for four years, and I’m already onto the fall of my fourth prime minister. The death drawls of a premiership have a familiar and tedious air; whatever Starmer says about l’affaire Mandelson, the original sin was appointing an old chum of the world’s most famous nonce as our man in Washington. The exact details of who knew what when are secondary to that mistake. The Prime Minister’s speech will allow for various itches to be scratched.