Of all the people who should carry the can for Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour party, Andy Burnham doesn’t get his fair share of the stick. It was, after all, Burnham’s fear of being the most left-wing candidate in the 2015 leadership contest that led to Corbyn being ‘loaned’ enough MPs’ votes to get Dear Jeremy on the ballot.
Despite this fact, Burnham felt no shame in saying in an interview this weekend that, ‘I still think life would have been different if I had won in 2015’, as if he hadn’t been his own worst enemy in denying that victory from taking place. That’s before we move onto mention all of the damage that Burnham’s hapless attempt to fix the contest did to his party in the wake of the four and a half years of Corbynism that followed. Shamelessness does seem to be a trademark of Burnham’s politics — now more than ever.
Burnham is putting himself in the shop window as the next Labour leader in a way that borders on self-parody
Mere days after being re-elected as mayor of Manchester, Burnham is putting himself in the shop window as the next Labour leader in a way that is so in your face it borders on self-parody. Of course, in all of the copious interviews Burnham has done with the national press over the past week or so he has denied that he is after Starmer’s job. That’s part of his game; to paraphrase here, ‘I’m not thinking about the Labour leadership at all but of course, if it came free I’d be the best person for the job, obviously.’
Burnham clearly knows what he’s doing with all of this, including how much he is undermining Keir Starmer’s already shaky authority within the party. He must know that he is damaging his party by throwing himself on top of the Starmer pile on. And at a time when Angela Rayner is also trying to use her attempted sacking to jostle her way to prominence. Yet Burnham did so anyhow, with gusto.
For a guy whose shtick is all about how out of touch Westminster politicians are, this whole routine is more than a little rich. Manchester’s ‘local champion’ clearly doesn’t feel being the mayor of one of the largest and most historically rich cities in England is enough for his ego. It feels a bit like he said what he needed to say about the importance of localism and devolved power in the run-up to the 6 May elections — then wasted no time afterwards in making his national ambitions known to anyone who would listen.
All of this jockeying by Burnham and other senior Labour figures is the worst thing they could do at the moment if seeing their party win the next general election is something they are remotely interested in. The message Burnham has been sending out is: ‘Look, after Hartlepool we have to be honest with ourselves. Labour is not going to win the next general election. No chance. It’s time to start thinking about what happens after we lose the next one to make sure we win the one after that.’
It feels like the soft left of the Labour party is thinking ahead to the fallout from a fifth general election loss in a row — with Burnham trying to anoint himself the saviour who will deliver the party from falling into the hands of the hard left once again. A pretty arrogant stance considering he isn’t even a member of the parliament party at present. Of course, that’s an easy thing to fix — just lean on someone with a safe seat in Greater Manchester to step down and create a by-election even Labour can’t lose. Someone will take a peerage for it, surely. More hypocritical ‘man of the people’, anti-backroom stuff from Burnham will be voiced during that whole affair, of course, willingly blind to the irony of it all.
The way Burnham has carried on this past week makes it even more difficult for anyone outside of Labour to come to any other conclusion than that the party is well and truly doomed at the next election. If Labour veterans are signalling this in 2021, what hope is there that in 2023 or 2024 Starmer is still going to look prime ministerial? As ever, the biggest enemy of the Labour party is the Labour party itself.
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