As far as endorsements go, Andy Burnham is winning the Labour leadership contest hands down. He has managed to recruit Dan Jarvis – someone who has gained huge respect and admiration despite the fact no-one knows very much about him – as his latest backer.
Jarvis tells the Mirror that Burnham ‘has the strength, experience and character needed to bring our party together and restore Labour’s connection with the British people’.
Now, firstly this is a bit of a clue as to where Jarvis’s own politics lie: he’s a little more left wing than someone people who are caught up in his compelling back story may have noted. That’s one of the things that would have made him a good leader in his own right: he could make the case for his beliefs without the encumbrance of a load of baggage and assumptions about what he stands for. Still, he hasn’t pitched himself as a particularly ideological figure and this endorsement helps Burnham’s pitch – set out in the Spectator long before there was a vacancy – that he is ‘mainstream Labour’.
But secondly, this is a huge boost to Burnham among the membership of the party: along with Rachel Reeves, who has already backed Burnham, Jarvis is hugely respected. That the Shadow Health Secretary has managed to accrue so many supporters already suggests there is merit in playing a long game as a leadership candidate and working on your support even when there is a leader firmly in place, as Burnham did under Miliband.
That so many of the 2010 stars have endorsed Burnham is also a boost to his credentials, as it suggests that while he is figure from Labour’s past, the future generation also back him.
There is though, a question as to whether the party will ‘let the public in’, as Harriet Harman argued earlier today. So far Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham have been producing a conveyor belt of supporters, which rather gives the impression that the leadership contest will be sorted within just a few weeks of Ed Miliband resigning. That hardly gives the impression Labour MPs are going through a long period of introspection about the future of their party.
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