Andy Burnham will be the latest entrant through the farcical revolving door at
No. 10 Downing Street. He returns to Westminster on a wave of increasing polarity within UK politics and society. He has decades of mess to clear up, and just three years to do it in before the electorate has another chance to voice its opinion. So what can one expect from the new incumbent down from Manchester?

Firstly, will he call a General Election? Highly unlikely. There is no obligation to do so; it hasn’t happened since the mid-term change of Prime Minister 71 years ago, with Anthony Eden calling one upon his mid-term elevation in 1955. That, and Labour isn’t doing well in the polls right now, so if Burnham doesn’t have to call an election, he almost certainly won’t.

Seven Prime Ministers in 10 years is hardly the stuff of ‘stable government’, and even the Italian political commentators, famous for lampooning their own country’s short-term administrations and government instability, are satirising the UK’s current, ongoing mess.

Every incoming Prime Minister likes to believe they are the ones who bring about a strong and stable government. Remember that line?

But look at what he is facing. Growth is feeble, public debt has reached 95% of GDP, public services are stuttering, and the armed forces are depleted and hollowed out to the point that they couldn’t defend against a Sesame Street brigade led by Liz Truss. The streets are grubby, and the electorate is in a sulphuric mood. The welfare bill now swallows the majority of the income tax raised, illegal immigration is causing riots on the streets, and trust in politicians is at an all-time low.  And the UK has the highest borrowing costs of any member of the G7.

So is Burnham the Superman who can fix all of this? A man who failed twice to get the job, and now the country is down to the dregs of the political barrel, yet he shows little sign of grasping the scale and urgency of the tasks that await him.

On June 29th, Burnham gave a speech in Manchester, his first since Starmer’s resignation, which Steven Swinford, writing in The Times, pointed out was “big on vision and rhetoric but short on detail.”

The only thing that was made clear from Burnham’s speech was that he wishes to devolve power to the UK’s regions to take some of it away from the ‘broken’ culture of Westminster. This is not a new idea. Rishi Sunak moved certain functions of nine government departments to Darlington while at No.10, a move considered a success on several levels in many circles.

This would entail a fresh set of civil servants working outside the capital and away from the tragic farce Westminster has become over the past few decades. It would be good to think this new intake wouldn’t be the slavering, cynical hypocrites we have become tragically used to. We shall see.

Instead of considering a balance of simple tax rises and spending cuts, Burnham is already resorting to people-pleasing. He claims he can find the money for more defence by cutting welfare through ‘preventative’ schemes rather than ‘crude cuts’, whatever that means. He plans to invest in infrastructure by finding flexibility within the existing fiscal rules to eke out more borrowing. Rather than focus on making taxes efficient, he has needlessly told voters that he will not increase the biggest revenue-raisers – the same straitjacket that forced Starmer into painful fiscal contortions.

His instincts do not appear to lean towards a convincing programme either. One reason is his chameleon-like nature. Britain’s next Prime Minister twists with the wind and panders to people in the room. His view of Europe depends on who is asking.

Nostalgia is a problem, too. At a time of extraordinary technological and geopolitical change, Burnham tells voters that he will turn back the clock on ’40 years of neoliberalism.’ Instead of seizing the moment to prepare Britain for artificial intelligence or to make the most of the country’s world-class services, he proposes taking control of utilities and bringing industrial jobs back to the north. That will soak up government time and money and will fail, further discrediting the state and fuelling populism.

Like with any leader - of country or party - a fair amount of their personal beliefs and politics have to be checked at the door. What he believes and what he can deliver will not be aligned. He’s not a president, so he can’t change laws on a whim.

The Labour Party still has an enormous majority in the House of Commons, so one of his first points of business, once he has appointed a new Cabinet, is to try to unite a broad church of MPs, none of whom will agree with anyone about everything.

A lot will come down to whether he is willing to take on his own MPs. Almost by definition, any programme of reform that is worth doing will require measures that the left does not like. After Starmer lost his authority, early in his term, the backbenchers gained a taste for rebellion. Will the biddable Mr Burnham be able to say no?

Whether Burnham’s wishes to push the nationalisation agenda further will be determined by several factors. For a start, the idea of the water companies coming back under public ownership would be extremely popular (82% of respondents to the latest YouGov poll prefer public ownership), but legislation is not currently going through Parliament, nor was it in the manifesto.

Additionally, it will be vital to first ascertain the water companies’ working business model. At present, there is a farcical situation where they all factor into their business plan the puny fines they get for spreading untreated shit across land and sea.

So who should run them? In reality, that is a secondary issue. The more important point is the level of accountability, whether that be private or public operators. If a person or group of people run a company well, they should rightly expect the rewards. If not, measures need to be taken.

However, the definition of ‘running a company well’ is not clear. ‘Well’ for whom? Shareholders? The customers? The executives? Everyone? They don’t operate in a vacuum, and as public utilities, they need greater scrutiny, regardless of who is running them - state or private. For now, it will be ‘as you were’.

Whether other public utilities will be in Burnham’s crosshairs is unclear. His silence on those matters would leave one to believe that, if he does wish to pursue them, it won’t be during the lifetime of the current Parliament - he simply won’t have the mandate or the time.

Burnham has also stated that he would like to reinstate the Birmingham-to-Manchester HS2 link. It will take a huge feasibility study, especially after Rishi Sunak unilaterally cancelled that part of the project and sold much of the land along the intended route. There will be myriad hurdles to cross; political chicanery will need to start again from the outset, with many local and national interest groups to appease. This alone could be the straw that breaks his political back.

HS2 is a project with no party lines; it enjoys cross-party support AND cross-party opposition in Parliament. However, what Burnham does intend is that it will be funded in a similar manner to Crossrail and the Channel Tunnel - with private capital investment.

That said, we are probably years, if not decades, away from knowing if this can be successfully resurrected. The main takeaway from this is his stated desire to link the northern cities of the UK to London - the so-called ‘Northern Powerhouse’ - better than they currently are.

There are many factors which point towards Burnham’s reluctance to be specific at this time on policy and how much - or little - it will shift. The most obvious factor is that there is no guarantee he will be Prime Minister, though it is probable. It is frustrating for political commentators, given the current lack of clarity in Burnham’s vision, but - somewhat fortuitously - we are approaching the summer recess, when the Westminster machine (or at least the Parliamentary, public-facing part of it) grinds down.

What is unlikely is a complete restart from what went before. Markets don’t like chaos, and Burnham himself won’t have a mandate to do anything fundamental. If he wants to bring his own policy agenda to the table, he will have to go to the country. Labour is currently enjoying a small ‘Burnham Bounce’, but these things rarely - if ever - last. Therefore, his safest, and probably only, course of action is to continue with the manifesto on which his party won the 2024 election, while actually adhering to that document, something his predecessor was criticised for failing to do.

He could be installed as Prime Minister as early as July 20th, as long as no new challenger makes themselves known before then; this will be highly unlikely. Even the previous would-be challenger, Wes Streeting, has thrown his support behind Burnham (someone wants their old job back, it would seem…)

Additionally, MPs on the government benches will be jostling and preening themselves to get a job, preferably in the Cabinet, or anything away from the backbenches. This will send the political press pack into overdrive. They do love tittle-tattle, and it’s this tedious gossip, possibly more than anything (alright, apart from MPs’ inability to be straight, dodgy donations, seedy behaviour, personal irresponsibility, lust-filled sordid affairs, ambivalence towards their constituents, and outright bare-faced dishonesty) that drives the public up the wall.

Talk, therefore, of left-turns or resets or policy change or devolution doesn’t really help anyone - supporter or opponent, commentator or activist - as no one knows exactly what’s happening next, and that probably includes Andy Burnham himself.

Platinum, along with most of the country, sincerely hopes that Andy Burnham surprises us all and gets to grips with all the thorny issues. He may possess powerful insights into why Britain has become so sclerotic and unhappy. He may choose ministers and advisers who can build a programme for change, while he becomes salesman-in-chief. His slogan is ‘hope’; perhaps that can make hard truths palatable.

Either way, he will have to be fast. British voters quickly tire of incumbents. They will tire all the faster of a PM who took power in a putsch. But they set the timetable. Their man is in no position to ask for patience.

If he cannot rise to the task, he will be exposed quickly, and the verdict will be brutal. He has made a career out of blaming Britain’s troubles on the elites of Westminster. Soon, those troubles will be his responsibility alone.