Burnham fires warning shot at Starmer

Labour conference begins on Sunday. Keir Starmer is under fire, besieged by all sides. The party’s left think he is a fraud; the party’s right believe him to be incompetent. All agree that he is rudderless and fear he is leading Labour to defeat. So it is with exquisite timing then that Andy Burnham has done a big glossy interview with the New Statesman, who stick him on the front of their cover, four days before the Prime Minister meets with his mutinous members up in Liverpool.

The Mayor of Greater Manchester’s intervention is predictably unhelpful for Starmer. Amid plenty of wistful musings about the joys of Northern England, Burnham signals his discontent with the direction of this government. He suggested that a ‘wholesale’ reset is necessary, if an ‘existential’ defeat to Reform is to be avoided at the next election. ‘I’m going to put the question back to people at Labour conference,’ he said. ‘Are we up for that wholesale change? Because I think that’s what the country needs.’ It is a marked difference to Starmer’s recent NS interview, in which the Prime Minister suggested that Britain was neither broken, nor needed a Thatcher-style reset.

Helpfully, Burnham has a whole policy agenda ready to go. He speaks about his love of electoral reform and the need for a more assertive foreign policy. He believes the Home Office’s scheme to resettle asylum seekers is ‘atrocious’; that ministers should decry Brexit as a ‘mistake’. For Burnham, ‘public control is everything’. Local government, he says, ought to play more of a role in rail, water, energy and housing. ‘Rolling back the 1980s’ is the Mayor’s summary of his politics. It is an agenda that, funnily enough, aligns perfectly with the prejudices of much of the Labour membership. Burnham may protest his anger about media stories about his return and No. 10’s ‘hostile briefing’. But it can hardly be a surprise, given the pressure that the national leadership is currently under.

Burnham has, generously, decided to deliberately limit his appearances at this year’s conference, with only ‘two or three events’ expected over the four-day bonanza. For some in No. 10 that will be more than enough. Starmer now enjoys worse personal ratings after his party’s 14 months in office than Rishi Sunak did after the Conservatives’ 14 years. Even if Burnham does not end up returning to Westminster, his continued status as the King across the Mersey risks embarrassing Starmer and making him look weak by comparison.