Andy Burnham’s Route to Power Is Anything but Easy

Who knows what will happen in between this article being written, and its editor hitting publish? Will Keir Starmer still be Prime Minister? Will Wes Streeting have announced a leadership bid? Will a merciful asteroid fall on the Emirates stadium, and spare me the ignominity of seeing the other team win the Premier League?

In the past seven days alone, the Greens and Reform made historic breakthroughs in the local elections, Labour lost Wales for the first time in a century, Mathys Tel scored a goal, Catherine West thew her hat in the ring as Labour leader, about a million Labour MPs you’ve never heard of told Keir Starmer to resign, Catherine West withdrew her pitch to become Labour leader, Jess Philips quit, Andy Burnham made a successful journey on the Avanti West Coast, Wes Streeting saw The Devil Wears Prada 2 at the cinema and resigned as Health Secretary, Catherine West said she might, actually, vote for Keir Starmer in a leadership election, and Andy Burnham finally found someone to give up their parliamentary seat so that he can have a go at returning to the House of Commons. Plot twist? It’s Josh Simons, former Director of Labour Together (aka Morgan McSweeney’s Barmy Army), who made the sacrifice play.

After months of denying that he was after Keir Starmer’s job, and days of keeping schtum as his allies attempted to dislodge the Prime Minister by quitting the government one-by-one, Wes Streeting finally made his move. In a letter citing the local election result, Streeting accused his boss of having a lack of vision. The wording of the letter made clear that, in his Wesignation, Streeting is trying to appeal beyond his narrow faction on the Labour Right. He took aim at Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech, accused him of ignoring backbenchers, and of having a “heavy-handed approach” to dissenting voices within the party (read: he removes the whip from anyone who pipes up).

One notable absence from the text was, however, any announcement of his own leadership bid. There are two possible reasons for this. The first is that, despite many of his allies going over the top earlier this week, Wes Streeting might not yet have the numbers amongst the PLP to make it onto the ballot. The second, suggested by his coy reference to desiring “the best possible field of candidates” in a leadership election, is that he’s unlikely to win amongst the Labour membership in a straight head-to-head against Keir Starmer. But, then again, it’s difficult to picture him winning against Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband, or Andy Burnham either.

Speaking of Andy Burnham: the King of the North finally has a path back to the Commons. Had it not been for the Starmer-aligned National Executive Committee blocking him from standing in Gorton and Denton earlier this year, the spectacle of the sitting Mayor of Manchester shopping around for a parliamentary seat could look a little undignified. It was clear that the factional chokehold that the Labour right had on candidate selection was damaging to their electoral chances. And after the recent dire results, in which the party haemorrhaged votes to both their right and left, people are willing to look past a bit of constituency-sniffing from the politician with the best chance of outperforming Labour’s polling.

But it ain’t easy to persuade someone to willingly give up an eighty-grand base salary, even if you’re Labour’s Great Red Hope. Luckily for Andy Burnham, Josh Simons decided to announce that he’d be stepping aside in the Wigan constituency of Makerfield (Azfal Khan, I will never forgive you for robbing me of the opportunity to use ‘From Rusholme, With Love’ as a headline). If you’re wondering why a 2024-intake MP and former frontbencher, who isn’t even on the soft-left, would euthanise his own political career; well, maybe, Josh Simons is just a nice guy. Or it might be that his time as Director of Labour Together is still under scrutiny, and the subject access requests sent into the organisation by various leftwing figures have just been fulfilled.

The route through Makerfield is a rough one. Reform performed well in the council wards that were up for election this year, and are projected to win the constituency in the next General Election. Nigel Farage has vowed to “throw absolutely everything at” the by-election, and at the time of writing, the Greens haven’t given any indication that they’d be willing to step aside. Andy Burnham has bet the house on his good name, and will be hoping to squeeze the combined Lib Dem and Green vote (11% in 2024) in an anti-Reform bloc. If he wins, there’s no other Labour leadership candidate who’d be able to make the better claim of being able to beat Nigel Farage in 2029. If he loses – well, we all have that player we were convinced could turn our season around once he was back from injury.

Keir Starmer, for his part, has been channeling his inner Mick McCarthey. You can’t help but wonder whether the Prime Minister, or those close to him, spent the Easter holidays studying the series of Conservative Party regicides which toppled Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss in succession, and alighting on a simple tactical solution: just refuse to leave, even when everybody wants you to. Like bureaucratic Hannibal Barca, Starmer has put himself to weaponising agendas and meetings to frustrate colleagues who want him gone.

Perhaps, if Liz Truss had some of Sir Keir’s stubbornness, she might have outlived that lettuce. On Tuesday, he apparently told Cabinet that he would only discuss the future of his leadership with them individually – and then refused to meet with anyone one on one. On Wednesday (using the looming King’s Speech as an excuse for brevity) he summoned the mutinous Wes Streeting to Downing Street, only to dismiss his presence after about a quarter of an hour. This is a Prime Minister whose survival is measured moment by moment, meeting minute to meeting minute.

That groaning sound you hear? It’s the sound of British constitutional conventions straining under the weight of events. The done thing in this country, not that we bothered to codify it, is for Prime Ministers to serve for as long as they have the confidence of their party. Though he would no doubt balk at the comparison, the Prime Minister’s disregard for the ‘good chap’ model of British statecraft is starting to resemble his predecessor, the erstwhile MP for Uxbridge. Boris Johnson mowed through constitutional convention like a drunk at the wheel of a combine harvester; Keir Starmer, less of a showman by nature, simply pretends that it isn’t there.