There’s a political trick that only works if nobody notices it happening, and Andy Burnham has just got away with it.
Conservative MP Katie Lam deserves real credit for being one of the few people willing to say so plainly, in her recent article: Britain’s new Prime Minister has arrived at Number 10 having answered almost no questions about what he actually intends to do once he’s there.
Think about what just happened. A sitting MP resigned his seat so Burnham could parachute into Parliament. A by-election was fought and won. A “leadership contest” unfolded that barely deserved the name. And through all of it, the man now running the country gave the public precisely one substantive media appearance, to Gary Lineker, not exactly known for forensic political interrogation.
Meanwhile, Labour used its Commons majority to block a single extra sitting day that would have let MPs actually question him before recess. Whatever you think of Burnham’s politics, that sequence should trouble anyone who cares about basic democratic accountability. A Prime Minister who cannot be bothered to explain himself to the electorate before taking the keys to Downing Street has skipped a step that matters.
There is a further point buried in that sequence that deserves more attention than it has had. Labour did not choose its new leader from among the MPs the country actually elected in 2024. It went to the trouble of engineering a by-election, persuading a sitting member to resign his own seat, purely so that someone from outside that intake could stand. Whatever the party’s internal reasoning, the effect speaks for itself: not one of the hundreds of Labour MPs voters sent to Westminster two years ago was judged capable of leading the party into this moment. That is not a minor procedural footnote. It’s a fairly damning verdict, delivered by Labour about itself.
It is worth being clear about what this change actually was, too. Britain has switched Prime Ministers mid-term, through a by-election engineered for the purpose, with no general election anywhere in sight. That is not unconstitutional, and it is not unprecedented. But it does mean Burnham’s personal mandate is much thinner than his warm polling suggests. Voters in Makerfield elected an MP. The country did not elect a Prime Minister. That gap deserves to be part of the story, not because it is scandalous, but because it should keep the “fresh start” framing honest.
Lam’s response to this vacuum is exactly the right one: if Burnham won’t tell us his plans, we judge him on what he’s already done. And the record, once you actually look at it, is not the record of a bold reformer, it’s the record of a man who has spent decades near the top of British public life while the problems around him metastasised.
Stafford Hospital is the starkest example. As Health Secretary, Burnham was the minister who resisted a full public inquiry into hundreds of excess deaths under his own department’s watch. That isn’t ancient trivia dredged up for effect, it’s a direct data point about how he handles institutional failure when it’s politically inconvenient to confront it. Then there’s Greater Manchester, the place where Burnham built his political brand as a can-do metro mayor. Rough sleeping there has now risen for four consecutive years, despite it being the literal subject of his first pledge as PM. And Greater Manchester Police, which he oversaw for years, was placed into special measures after inspectors discovered it had simply failed to record more than 80,000 crimes in a single year. These aren’t abstract policy disagreements. They’re outcomes, on his watch, in his own backyard.
And then there’s the company he keeps, which tells you as much about a leader’s judgment as any manifesto. Louise Haigh, handed the “propriety and ethics” brief, resigned from Cabinet after a fraud conviction connected to false insurance claims, and she is worth dwelling on specifically. She is not simply a casualty of Burnham’s reshuffle, she is one of the people he chose to keep close and then promote into the one job that is supposed to police everyone else’s conduct. Lucy Powell returns to Cabinet having previously dismissed grooming gang concerns as a “dog whistle.” Angela Rayner, sacked over a tax dispute on an £800,000 flat, is now Housing Secretary. Ed Miliband, whose net zero zealotry has helped drive up energy bills for millions, has been promoted to Foreign Secretary, with an even more radical successor installed at Energy. If personnel is policy, Burnham’s personnel choices are not remotely reassuring.
That last appointment points to a gap in Burnham’s record that has had far less attention than it deserves. His entire career has been built on domestic and devolved government: health, policing, local leadership in Greater Manchester. He is now Britain’s chief representative on Ukraine, on defence spending commitments, and on the relationship with Washington, at a moment when all three demand sustained attention rather than good instincts learned running a city region. That is not a smear, it is simply an untested part of the job, and it should be treated as one.
The broader point Lam makes, and it’s the sharpest one in the piece, is that Burnham is being sold to the public as a fresh start when he is nothing of the sort. This is a man who entered Parliament a quarter of a century ago, served in Gordon Brown’s Cabinet, and now leads the exact same Parliamentary Labour Party that just spent months collapsing behind Keir Starmer, and that could not produce a single leader of its own from within its 2024 ranks. The instincts on tax, welfare and immigration haven’t changed because the face at the podium has.
Burnham has, so far, tried to have it both ways: promising continuity with Labour’s 2024 manifesto and fiscal rules, while also promising the biggest change in politics in forty years. Those two claims can survive a few weeks of favourable coverage. They cannot both survive contact with a Budget. Either the tax and spending numbers move, or the talk of transformation was just better presentation on the same Starmerism. Conservatives do not need to guess which it will be, they need only be ready to hold up whatever happens against what was promised.
None of this means the Conservative Party’s problems begin and end with Burnham. Reform is currently the more urgent electoral threat, and recent polling showing Labour and Reform almost level, with the Conservatives behind both, makes that hard to dispute. But that is an argument for sharpening the case against Labour’s ideas, not softening it. The two fights are not in competition with each other, they are sequential. Win the argument against a bigger, more expensive, more interventionist state first, and the argument about who is best placed to deliver something smaller and more competent follows naturally. Spend the next year fighting only Reform for the same voters while Labour’s record goes unchallenged, and the Conservative Party hands Burnham exactly the free pass Katie Lam is warning against.
None of this is to say Burnham’s premiership is doomed (although I personally believe it is), or that his defenders have no case at all. It’s early, he’s been in post just days, and his allies would rightly point out that judging a government purely on the record of individual ministers, rather than the programme it is about to set out, risks becoming its own kind of unfairness. Supporters would also argue his standing with Labour MPs and his warmer public reception reflect a level of trust that Starmer had long since lost, and that comparing him unfavourably to the man he has just replaced, before he’s had a chance to govern, is premature. Those are fair points, and Burnham will get the chance in the coming months, starting with his first Budget, to prove them right.
But fair points aren’t the same as an answer to Lam’s central charge, which is that we shouldn’t have to wait months to get basic clarity from a Prime Minister about his own plans for the country. That’s not an unreasonable standard. It’s the minimum one.
