Journalists are split, the old joke says, about whether or not North London is the centre of the universe. Half of them think it is, the other half know it is! The Labour party in recent decades has had no doubt at all – four of its last five leaders were proud North Londoners. Whatever their political differences may have been, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn, Ed Miliband and Keir Starmer could agree on one thing – North London was the place to be.
That tune changed early in the morning of 18 June when the scale of Andy Burnham’s victory in the Makerfield by-election became clear. In what was number six on Reform’s target list, Andy Burnham had doubled the Labour vote in the six weeks since the local elections and had beaten both Reform and their far right rivals Restore combined.
Suddenly, the tectonic plates within the Labour party were moving. A new North had been discovered, a true North. And its king, the soon to be former mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, was about to embark on the greatest trek south since the Beatles.
The breathless press coverage was one thing – peaking with the Sky News helicopter broadcasting live footage of a train travelling, with its customary delay, between the two fixed points of Manchester Piccadilly and London Euston. The changing tone within the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) was something else. The inevitability of a Burnham leadership challenge accelerated so fast that first Keir Starmer said he was resign as Labour leader and then even potential challengers resigned as potential challengers.
This culminated in yesterday’s East German style nomination process for the post of leader of the Labour party. Only 81 MPs – 20 per cent of the PLP – were needed for a nomination, but by tea time 322 of them had nominated Andy Burnham. Some had been queuing from early in the morning to make sure their names came high up in the list. Unfortunately for them, the Labour party only issued an alphabetic list. But, from the new intake to the old lags, they were posting on social media to make sure they claimed early credit for their bold and brave choice.
The names include those of all factions and none. Yet they all mean the same thing. They all share an ideology. Not Burnhamism or Manchesterism but another powerful Northern ideology: ‘Yosserism’. A philosophy summed up simply: ‘Gissa job! I could do that.’ That was the catchphrase of Yosser Hughes, the unemployed Liverpudlian construction worker in Alan Bleasedale’s classic BBC series The Boys from the Blackstuff. Now the fear of unemployment stalks SW1 rather than Liverpool 1. A new PM means a new Cabinet and new ministers. The safest thing to do is move with the herd. And boy did they!
The MPs who nominated Burnham all share one thing
The real interest is in those yet to nominate Burnham. That group of around 80 seems split broadly into two groups. There is the ‘Officer Class’, made up of those MPs who hold key Labour party positions: the outgoing leader Keir Starmer, the chair of the PLP Jess Morden, the party chair Anna Turley, and the chair of the National Executive Committee Shabana Mahmood. And there are those who might be called the ‘Prematurely Correct’. MPs such as John McDonnell, Apsana Begum, Ian Byrne and Richard Burgon who had the whip suspended because they supported an SNP amendment to the King’s Speech calling for the two child benefit cap to be lifted, an act which Keir Starmer now boasts was one of his proudest achievements as prime minister. Timing in politics is everything.
At times like these, when three in four Labour MPs have done the same thing, it is hard to discern real factional trends. But it’s clear that with a payroll vote of between 160 and 170, and a legal limit of 22 attending cabinet and a physical limit on adding many more ‘ministers attending Cabinet’, around half of the MPs nominating Andy Burnham yesterday will be disappointed in their near future.
