Saturday night’s announcement from Andy Burnham, that he wants back into Westminster as Labour’s candidate in Gorton & Denton, landed with the subtlety of a dropped piano in a parliamentary library.
Challenging the authority of a sitting prime minister is never a casual hobby, and yet here we are, the Greater Manchester mayor firing off a public letter, praising Keir Starmer’s government with one hand while reaching for its crown with the other.
Forgive me if I don’t gasp in surprise. I said over a year ago this would happen. The writing wasn’t merely on the wall, it was spray painted in luminous Labour red with a marching band pointing at it. Labour’s internal tectonic plates have been grinding for months, U turns, factional briefings, simmering resentment from the old guard, and a progressive wing that seems permanently halfway out the door. Burnham’s move is not the cause of this chaos. It’s the symptom.
And goodness me, what a symptom.
Let’s be clear about what’s going on. Burnham has asked Labour’s NEC for permission to run in the by election triggered by Andrew Gwynne’s exit, insisting he wants to “support” the government and help Labour “go further and faster.” He talks about the cost of living crisis, about renationalising utilities, about taking the fight to Reform “at a national level.” All very noble, all very cooperative, if you ignore the small matter that Starmer’s allies are reportedly desperate to block him for fear he could mount a leadership challenge. Polling suggests Labour might even lose Burnham’s Manchester mayoralty to Reform if he steps down. The NEC’s officers group now holds the detonator. Ten people. One decision. A million pound mayoral election hanging in the balance.
Meanwhile, Sadiq Khan, Ed Miliband and Angela Rayner are lining up behind Burnham, talk of pacts and future leadership tickets is already doing the rounds, and Shabana Mahmood is on the Sunday shows begging colleagues to “calm down” and avoid “psychodrama.”
Psychodrama? This is Shakespeare with WhatsApp groups.
Labour is a mess. I genuinely struggle to name more than five MPs I’d class as first rate. Graham Stringer leads that respectable little platoon, and after that the roll call thins out alarmingly. Old school Labour, the practical, patriotic, tough minded version, has vanished. In its place sits a collection of hyper ideological campaigners who talk in slogans, flirt with nationalising half the economy before breakfast, and too often don’t appear to have done the homework.
Which brings me to London this week.
I was down there with members of the Chagossian community, armed with leaflets ahead of a key vote. I stationed myself by that discreet little entrance off Westminster Underground, the one MPs like to use when they don’t fancy the cameras, and handed them out by the hundred. The contrast between the parties was, instructive.
Many Conservatives stopped, asked questions, took the papers seriously. A striking number of Labour MPs breezed past looking as though they’d lost a fight with their wardrobes. One was literally carrying documents in a Tesco bag. A Tesco plastic bag. When I spoke to several of the Labour lot, it became clear they hadn’t the foggiest idea where the Chagos Islands even are, let alone the implications of voting, almost unanimously as it turned out, on matters involving British territory. One glanced at my leaflet and told me to get lost. Another scrunched it up in front of me and dropped it at my feet.
Lovely. You and I are paying these people to run the country.
Now, does that make Andy Burnham a saviour? Hardly. He’s still a deeply flawed operator, useful and dangerous in equal measure. If he wins that seat he’ll be flying high again, strutting the Commons benches with leadership speculation swirling around him like confetti. But “less useless and dangerous than the current set up” is not exactly a ringing endorsement, it’s more a comment on the parlous state of the competition.
Look at his record in Manchester, big ambitions, yes, but also costly missteps and governance rows that would have any other politician roasted over hot coals. I once interviewed him about German firms buying buses from the UK, an inconveniently positive story for a Conservative prime minister at the time, and he flatly told me I was making it up. I wasn’t. He simply didn’t want Boris Johnson getting a sliver of credit.
And that, in miniature, is the difference. Conservatives, for all our sins, generally want Britain to succeed, no matter who happens to be in office. Labour, when out of power, too often seems to revel in gloom, as though national misfortune were an electoral strategy.
What terrifies Starmer’s inner circle isn’t just Burnham’s profile, it’s the maths. Gorton & Denton is no longer safe territory. Electoral Calculus points to a possible Green surge. Reform is circling. Zack Polanski, George Galloway, Reform heavyweights, pick your flavour of vote splitting. Some Labour MPs already believe Burnham is the only figure who could hold the seat, and that blocking him, if Reform were to win, would finish Starmer altogether. As one reportedly put it, it would look like he’d put personal survival ahead of the party.
That is not the sort of sentence you want circulating about a prime minister eighteen months after a landslide victory. Well it wasn’t really a landscape victory. The “right’s vote” just split and Labour marched through the middle.
But yes, Burnham’s return bid is a huge blow to Starmer. Not because the mayor is a conquering hero, but because his very presence exposes the fault lines, between old Labour and new, between pragmatists and ideologues, between those terrified of Reform on the right and Greens on the left, and those quietly sharpening knives for the leadership.
I predicted this a year ago. Anyone paying attention did.
Labour can shout “psychodrama” all it likes, but when mayors plot, cabinet ministers line up behind rival power centres, and NEC committees are asked to referee existential battles on a Sunday morning, that’s not calm politics, that’s a party auditioning for another civil war.
Andy Burnham may yet be stopped. Or he may stride back into Westminster and become the most talked about man on the opposition benches overnight. Either way, the message is already clear.
Sir Keir Starmer is wobbling. He will gone soon.
And Labour knows it.
By Claire Bullivant
