Our new PM should enjoy the August bank holiday. It all kicks off tomorrow.
The party is over for Andy Burnham, now the battle begins (Image: Getty)
Andy Burnham has had a wonderful summer. All he needed to replace PM Keir Starmer was 24,927 votes in Makerfield and a train ticket south. After decades fighting to become Labour leader, it turned out that power was just a short hop from Manchester Piccadilly. In Westminster, Labour MPs greeted him like the messiah, while the nation was relieved to have a human being back in Number 10. What a start, what a summer.
Burnham has since treated us to a string of easy-peasy policy announcements on electricity bills, bus fares, pubs and rough sleeping. He even rocked up in Ukraine, where he got the chance to hang tough with war leader Volodymyr Zelensky and strum an old Smiths classic on a guitar. In between, he found time for a week-long family holiday, without the country falling apart in his absence. So far, he’s made leadership look simple. That’s about to change.
Parliament opens tomorrow (September 1). On Wednesday, he’ll face his first PMQs. And if he thinks he’s going to get an easy ride, he’s got another thing coming. She’s called Kemi Badenoch. Once Badenoch found her feet, she made short work of the former PM, exposing him as a witless, patronising chump, unable to think on his feet.
Burnham is no patsy. He can deflect attacks with a self-deprecating joke. But from tomorrow, the gloves are off and the knives are out, and Burnham’s soft underbelly will be exposed: his apparent inability to make tough decisions. They’re already piling up.
Early release prisoners is top of the list. The furious row over the release of the killers of PC Andrew Harper forced his first major U-turn. Harper’s killers will remain behind bars, but thousands of other violent offenders will still be set free. If someone dies, Burnham will be blamed.
Talking tough in Kyiv is one thing. But if we’re going to poke Vladimir Putin, we need to shape up. You can’t knock back tyrants with a cheeky joke. Starmer’s defence funding failures helped sink him, but Burnham’s policy is exactly the same.
Burnham toughest battles will be with his own party. He’s already ducked the first fight: welfare reform. Soon, we’ll see whether he has the nerve to lift the ban on new North Sea oil and gas extraction. Climate activists will be chucking paint around if he backs the drillers.
The PM has already bowed to left-wing activist pressure over Gaza by cracking down on trade with Israeli West Bank settlements. And he’s been keeping his head down over another controversial party issue: Shabana Mahmood’s immigration crackdown. He needs to back her with everything he’s got. But what has he got? We’ll soon find out.
Then there’s the upcoming Budget, where chancellor John Healey has to fund his boss’s spending pledges without taxing the economy to death. Today, Burnham is everybody’s mate. Unless he toughens up, he’ll look a pushover. And there’s no coming back from that.