“Why don’t you write,” my commissioning editor suggested yesterday, “an optimistic piece on Andy Burnham? Give him a chance, sort of thing?” This seemed, on the face of it, an admirably charitable and fair-minded suggestion. Amid the projectile-vomiting epidemic of demented negativity and hysterical loathing which, as I remarked in this space last week, is the daily stuff of our politics, I thought for a moment, he’s asking me to do something a little bit different.
Here’s the chance, he seemed to be suggesting, to say something as modest as: “How about we don’t condemn this guy as the worst Prime Minister in recorded history, a traitor, a liar, and a candidate for the Tower of London or, ideally, the scaffold, before he has even so much as wiped his shoes on the mat in the Downing Street hallway? He has an English degree, folk seem to like him, he wasn’t a disaster as mayor, and he can even quote The Life of Brian without sounding like a dalek: how bad can it be?”
When it comes to Andy Burnham, I struggle to muster much in the way of optimism
But then I gave my head a wobble, and I thought: “I know your game, pal. You don’t really want a piece arguing that Andy Burnham might not be a disaster because you think there’s a chance he might not be a disaster. You want someone to say he might not be a disaster, in order to tap into the sweet, sweet rage-clicks that come from anyone saying such a thing online, and in particular saying such a thing to an audience of people who, on the whole, will not be too keen to hear it.”
This is a role I don’t mind playing, as a rule. I wrote something similar when Sir Keir Starmer first arrived in Downing Street. Give Keir a chance, I said. He might make a hash of it, I said. He probably will make a hash of it, I said. But heigh ho: why don’t we let him make a hash of it before we decide he has? And I stand by that piece – though as I’ve written before, I confess to being genuinely surprised by how much of a hash he did make of it and how quickly.
But when it comes to Andy Burnham, I struggle to muster much in the way of optimism. I mean, yes, he has an English degree, folk seem to like him, and he wasn’t a disaster as mayor. Quotes Life of Brian. All of that.
But beyond a limp affirmation of the general principles that we should give people a chance to make their mistakes before we judge those mistakes, and that if the hateometer is in the red to start with it has nowhere else to go, it’s trickier to mount the defence-in-advance with Burnham
With Sir Keir, when he arrived, he promised (implicitly or explicitly) to be dull, honest, competent and principled. There was a whole team of new people around him. It seemed reasonable to give them the chance to keep that promise. Obviously, when you give people a chance to keep a promise, you also give them a chance to break it – and we all know how that turned out.
The situation now is not quite the same. The people around Burnham are not, most of them, going to be new people.
For reasons which are all to do with party management and not much to do with the public good, he’ll have to keep many of them onside.
He’s going to be trying to triangulate between traditional leftism and new right-populism and managerialism in a way that will completely scramble his brains. (My esteem for Wes Streeting’s low cunning went right up when he started talking about rejoining the EU ahead of the Makerfield by-election – knowing that to become PM Mr Burnham would need simultaneously to woo Labour MPs, who love Europe, and the voters of Makerfield, who don’t.)
Accordingly, the promises Burnham makes are not so straightforward nor so concrete as the modest promises that Sir Keir was able to make. He mutters, here and there, about disapproving of “neoliberalism”, I suspect because a certain type of voter on the left hates neoliberalism, and a certain type of voter on the right hates liberals and probably hasn’t bothered looking up what neoliberalism is.
He promises we won’t be “in hock to the bond markets”, but even my own very cursory understanding of economics tells me that being in hock to the bond markets isn’t something you really get a choice about as Prime Minister.
If you’re going to run a country with no debt, or better yet a mahoosive sovereign wealth fund, you can probably sort of avoid it. But those ships have slightly sailed, and what with increasing the defence budget, protecting the welfare budget, preventing our noble pensioners from freezing to death in the winter, building the infrastructure to make us global leaders in this, that and the other, and keeping his own backbenchers happy, it seems highly unlikely that Mr Burnham is going to pay off the national debt in his first couple of years in office. In fact, were I a betting man, I’d put a fiver on him increasing it a bit.
And the things people reach for as positives about him don’t necessarily augur all that well. I tend to agree with those sceptics who say that being a successful and popular mayor of Manchester may have little or nothing to do with being a good Prime Minister. After all, we tested a version of that theory with a successful and popular former mayor of London in Downing Street. And if you read the reporting of Joshi Herrmann – who covered Burnham’s mayoralty in detail in the outlet Manchester Mill – Burnham’s popularity and success as mayor were not as straightforward as all that.
He was, Hermann reports, genuine, emotionally connected and personable, but shaky at the level of detail: “He likes doing big things but he doesn’t like asking the kind of uncomfortable questions that turn great ideas into durable policy”.
Those yellow buses that got him such good press were a scheme that pre-dated his arrival:
“He was the perfect hype-man for a new system […] but even the dogs in the street know that Burnham didn’t create the Bee Network. Rather, the Bee Network created him.”
The picture Herrmann paints is of a man who wants to be liked, and is good at it, but not one with a steely approach to detail or a plan for coping with hard realities.
Still, he can quote Life of Brian – so, who knows? Always look on the bright side of life, eh? That’s the optimistic ditty that Brian sings when… well, never mind.
