So, the eyelashes have it. Andy Burnham, newly elected MP for Makerfield, arrived back in Westminster after a decade away, on a train that was followed much of the way by news helicopters, only to pull into London Euston 22 minutes late. That the prime minister-in-waiting was sufficiently delayed to qualify for a refund some might consider to be heavy with meaning.
And yet Burnham has shown up just as several KPIs on the Whitehall dashboard stop flashing red-for-danger – suggesting that Britain might finally be on the verge of looking up.
With NHS waiting times shrinking, immigration coming under control and even the economy showing signs of growth, Sean O’Grady said “Starmer with a northern accent” will surely go down as the “ultimate tap-in PM”, his predecessor having set up a hat-trick and more goals for him now to take the glory: “Starmer has slogged his way up the pitch and has at last managed to hit a ball goalwards when his upstart teammate nips through and claims for himself what was rightly Starmer’s winner.” Our current Number 10, he said, prolonging the football analogy, “is being robbed.”
Certainly, it’s all over for “two-year Keir”. In his political obituary, John Rentoul wondered if the man behind Labour’s second-greatest election win – but who felt compelled to resign after less than two years in the job – has simply been fatally unprepared for government. Despite being “energetic in foreign policy” and managing Donald Trump with “sufficient skill to protect Britain from the worst of US tariffs and to secure a threadbare trade deal, much of which was never implemented… he is likely to be remembered less for what he achieved than for a series of poor judgements that made a difficult situation impossible in a remarkably short space of time.”
With his replacement, there remain so many unanswered questions. Will it be a swift coronation, as many in his party want, and is that what the country voted for? (Faced with the prospect of the seventh prime minister in a decade, Labour’s immigration minister Mike Tapp demanded in his column that there should now be a general election…)
Who will Burnham pick for his chancellor, and why is it the most critical decision he will take? And, as Kay Burley elegantly put it, might the people of Makerfield soon come to regret electing him?
For Catherine Pepinster, the bigger head-scratcher was whether Britain is ready for its first ‘full-fat Catholic’ prime minister? When former altar boy Burnham, a devotee of the previous pope Francis, took the parliamentary oath, hand on Bible, he did so with unusual gusto – a sign, she says, that he may “govern from the papal playbook”.
His affable swearing-in will also have given others a chance to see his playful side on what is normally a solemn occasion. “He responded to a Monty Python-inspired heckle (“He's not the messiah!”) with good grace, replying with: “Naughty boy…”. How he reacted to the more pointed heckle by former Conservative minister Sir Desmond Swayne (“Rome is saved…” ) is not recorded in Hansard.”
Even Donald Trump may find Burnham’s obvious charms hard to resist. According to O’Grady, our “extremely liberal” prime minister-in-waiting could well be on course for a world-beating bromance with Starmer’s White House nemesis.
“Trump likes a winner, and if Burnham can be useful and suitably deferential to him, things might go surprisingly well between them. Both enjoy a wisecrack, and Trump might well respect a man who can hold his own, providing it’s all done with an underlying recognition of who’s in charge.”
And who’s in charge is likely to remain a burning question longer than our heatwave lasts. Until next week.
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