A PM with no substance: Andy Burnham is the ‘messiah without a mandate’ | The Daily T

We're in Downing Street, which has become Coronation Street for the day for the return of the King of the North, Andy Burnham.

Keir Starmer has fled in his carriage as Britain braces itself for its seventh Prime Minister in 10 years.

What I find astonishing about the scenes down here is that this is the coronation that literally No one has asked for beyond a handful of Labour backbenchers.

And the people of Makefield, you might reply, there was a by -election, what is it, 25 ,000 people in Makefield voted for him?OK, fine.But they were actually voting for an MP.There wasn't a leadership contest.No one ran against him.He was elected unopposed.

So this is not a glorious coronation so much as a dirty coup.

Andy Burnham and his wife Frankie have just gone into Downing Street for the first time.We've just heard a pretty short speech.No lectern.To be fair, no notes.And I couldn't see an autocue.

No, that's right.But then he did say everything he's been saying for the last four weeks, that he wants to bring back common sense, unity and national purpose, and everyone should work with him.Now, he knows, as he said, that he is the sixth person to do this walk in the last 10 years.That's the number of prime ministers we've got through.And there is a feeling in this crowd among the journalists that no one's taking this seriously anymore.

I know.We've done this too many times.

It's become a farce.So there isn't quite the same sense of historical expectation that there was for, say, Boris Johnson entering number 10.

It feels like we're on Groundhog Day today, let's be perfectly honest.

And he addressed that and said that politicians need to raise their game, that it's up to his generation to do it, and that Britain needs to regain our stability and to make politics work.work.People are fed up with politics and I hear you.

Let's hear him saying all of that.

I am acutely conscious that I am the sixth person.the last 10 years to walk up this street.The seventh Prime Minister since 2016.Making this a moment for reflection and new resolution.It requires my generation of politicians to raise our game and rise to the new challenge.Britain needs to show the world that we can regain our stability once again.

And that is our challenge, to make politics work, to make it work better.I know people at home are fed up with politics.I hear you, and I want to be honest with you.We have not been good enough, and we need to be better.We will be.We will make this moment a circuit breaker for Britain, bringing forward the biggest changes in the last 40 years.

Now, as he was speaking, we've had no Steve Bray today because the Brexit man has been banned from playing his music on his loudspeaker, which I think is an interesting development because at no point during the righties being in this building behind us did anyone ban Steve Bray, but today he's been banned.However, we did hear from a baritone.

Yes, someone is singing Beethoven's Ninth down there and not quite sure why or what the politics of that are.

I like the spirit of it.They will not be silenced.Those who want to bring classical music to Downing Street will not be quiet.

There was also the occasional shout of Jesus saves but as you say it is very strange that part of the almost constitutional tradition of this moment is that the Prime Ministeris drowned out by rhythm and bass.Well indeed.And it's very odd that this time for the first time, maybe it's having a lawyer in charge, I don't know, they figured out that actually that's against the rules and you can police it.

Well Bray was criticised for blasting out Ode to Joy during Starmer's resignation speech.Now you say about Jesus, I arrived here there was a big queue and somebody started shouting that Jesus was coming and I thought listen I know this guy is popular in Manchester he is the Messiah without a mandate everybody because what I find astonishing about the scenes down here is that this is the coronation that literally No one has asked for beyond a handful of Labour -backed benches.as the Prime Minister.

No, very good.

He says he's going to use that constituency as a touchstone.There was a little bit of magisterial magic, wasn't there, because, of course, he did do the kissing of hands with the King.He did.

And in the glorious half hour in which Britain did not have a Prime Minister, Larry the Cat came out into the street and started licking his paws and showing off.He did.

Larry basically came into the street, looked at the assembled media, started licking a few paws and then went, oh, God, not again.

For that brief moment, we were in safe hands.hands.Now, what's been interesting the last few weeks has been what Burnham's not been saying.He's not really talked at great length about immigration, about defense policy, about foreign policy.So we were braced with this speech at number 10.First time that quite frankly a lot of voters will be paying attention to this.

There hasn't been a massive bounce in the polls.There's notevidence of any kind of Burnham fever, or that the public has really...I don't know about you but I've spoken to lots of civilians and they all say to me either I didn't know this was happening or I don't know who the man is.

Or I don't really care anymore because I've lost interest in this farrago.

So here is his opportunity to introduce himself and maybe flesh out some policies.Now the aesthetics of it were very interesting.Starmer, and we'll talk about about him later was surrounded by the few friends he has left.Most of them employed in the civil service.By contrast, Burnham packed out Downing Street with people from Manchester.

Yes, that's right.

We were saying it had the feel of a day trip.

It did.It was a day trip from Bootle, I said.But generationally, it was quite diverse.There were kids here in football shirts.Yes.There was Peter Reid.

I can see him now, the old Everton footballer.He's a massive lefty.He's having a chat with Cathy Newman there.

Your old friend Dale Vince.

Oh, Dale Vince here.He wasn't in his singlet and shorts, unfortunately.

But he was wearing a yellow luminous bum bag.over his bum.Normally it goes around the front.Very easy to pickpocket and he's got quite a lot of money to steal.

For our American audience, that's also known as a fanny pack.

It's a fanny pack, yeah.

And he was wearing camouflaged trousers.Maybe he was trying to hide himself from the Daily D having walked off in a huff.

There were kids here.The message is I'm surrounding myself with ordinary people.

Ordinary Mancunians.

Ordinary Mancunians.It had a bit of a feel of a wedding photo about it.And as you said, no lector, which makes us worry that maybe one person has already lost their job.I mean, it's always the way with Labour.They always end their term with fewer people in employment than before.But what happened to the beluomo, the man who normally comes out with the lectern and puts it down?

Hot lectern guy, who you pointed out earlier was Liz Truss's only good appointment.

It's the only good appointment Liz Truss ever made.And I am told that the auditions actually ate into time that should have been spent preparing her budget.So he's not there.So the assumption is thatwere there.But when we braced ourselves for what is Burnhamism going to be, because we've all been wondering, what is Manchesterism?

What's it going to be?He said, it's going to be more collaborative.It's about problem solving.We're going to carry hope into every postcode in the land.We're going to build a new economy.OK, so what are the policies?

He said, later this year, I will come up with a new plan for Britain.A 10 -year plan?A 10 -year plan.

later this year.Could you get a move on because we've had weeks for this.

And he doesn't seem to realise he's currently in government.

That's right.Having said that, hang on, he did say he had one priority for as soon as he walked through the black door behind us and that was to end rough sleeping.

Which Labour has just legalised.by abolishing the Vagrancy Act.So good luck with that.

Didn't Keir Starmer, forgive me, pledge to end rough sleeping?I mean he's now sleeping rough because he's just lost his accommodation here.I'm sure that's a pledge that Labour's been making for the last five years.

And it got a big round of applause.But forgive me, it's a very Labour -y approach.I mean, hey, we all love the idea.No one likes people sleeping rough.It should be a government's long -term mission to abolish rough sleeping.But that's your priority.

Again, the whole election, everything that's been going on has been directed towards Labour members.The public has not been involved in this process at all.And it must be, it's a bit of a kick in the teeth, isn't it, to begin by saying my first priority is to end.rough sleeping.

Also I think I read some research from the Centre for Social Justice last week that says that actually homelessness in the UK has gone marginally up under Labour, so make it back if you will.

Well, getting rid of Keir Starmer, that's their first step.But he said he's going to offer us a circuit breaker.Remember, that's a circuit breaker from a Labour government.Yes.And he's going to give us breathing space, which means assistance that he's going to lay out tomorrow to help with the cost of living.And that, of course,

will come on top of breakfast clubs, VAT off museum visits, which, by the way, I'm making the most of.

They don't have the patience to wait an hour for the bus.They don't have the patience, young people, to wait one minute if you're late to collect them, but that's my own maternal hell for you.He also talked, talking about the youth of today, Tim, he did again lean into that idea of changing the education system.Yes.And he's obviously wanting to bring in T -levels, which are technical levels, to compete with academic levels, A -levels.We're still waiting for the reshuffle and we're trying to decide, as we're in Downing Street, how long are we going to wait?

How that choreography plays out is that some people might already be in there being told that they're losing their jobs.So we're assuming, and we're going to get onto Starmer in a minute, because of the big farewell to Starmer, featured a lot of cabinet ministers that are just in there right now being told they're being fired.Then we have to wait for people to walk up Downing Street, presumably with their hair and makeup and nails all done, and I include the men in that, to then get promoted into the jobs that people have just been ditched from.So that's all going to happen a little bit later.But we could do a whole cabinet runners and riders thing tomorrow, frankly.

We could do and I think we should.One thing we must observe, because we were talking about how we should dress for this event.

We were talking about whether we could dress up for Dynasty and it turns out that the 80s and

are back because Burnham made reference to rolling back the 1980s.Yes.That bad decisions were made in this country that we have to reverse by doing things like building more council housing and taking more things into public ownership.

Yeah.I was going to humbly suggest that actually it might be the 1970s that we want to reverse and that Thatcher did successfully reverse and that she brought inflation down from 22 % to 2%, that she raised living standards, that she allowed people to give on our generational inheritance, and that growth in every quarter of her reign, every quarter, was 2 .6%.Why don't we just pretend that Thatcherism was all a disaster?Because that really helps us nearly, what is it, half a century on?

But politics is a series of reversals, isn't it?Everyone is elected to reverse the thing that came before.She reversed the 70s, he's now promising to reverse the 80s.But there are several problems with this.One is that by attacking the 40 years of failure, he's attacking Labour governments.What are we to make of that?

Do we really believe Gordon Brown was a Thatcherite?That's kind of trashing the record of some of what Labour did that came before that was perfectly socially democratic.

Blairism, the government that you served in.

Yeah, well that's a very good point.

Are we just going to step over that because apparently the last 40 years have been an absolute unmitigated nightmare.Also, by the way, why haven't MPs like you improved the North?What were you doing in Lee for all those years?Most of the Red Wall has been dominated by Labour politicians.So if you haven't levelled up in your own constituencies, what's the point of you?But apparently it's all the right's fault.

Another problem with that argument about the 80s is some of what he is proposing, this government was already doing.Taking services back into public ownership and there's some talk about maybe doing this to Thames Water because there's no denying it is a disastrous business but this Labour Party was already nationalizing energy, it was already nationalizing the railways, it was already doingthe stuff on devolution that he's proposing.This is one of the peculiarities of Andy Burnham's rise to power.All the kids from Manchester are now posing in front of number 10.One of the peculiarities is he is arguing that the party hasn't been left -wing enough while also trying to say, I'm just here to actually do the manifesto.

You may have seen Lucy Powell trying to explain this over the weekend.And it was like watching a dog try to explain Kantian dualism.I mean, it's about locals, about being local, isn't it?It's about local people being local and living locally.But why don't you understand this?It's gibberish.

Because what he's actually just doing is what Labour has been doing for two years, and it hasn't been working, he's just going to do it more so in a Manchester accent.

Because that whole tax thing, that whole promise, and I remember it very well, we will not tax working people anymore.Now, we can have a debate that the last two budgets, which by the way have added £62 billion, £62 billion onto the tax bill, we're now more taxed than we've ever been.Tax take is 38 .5 % of GDP.That is historic.There's no more room for tax rises, but you might find some and then you still think that you can honour that manifesto.I don't think you can.

No, this is the point.He's trapped by it.So one thing that we know he's going to do is he's going to speed up drilling in the North Sea, but it's not going to open new drilling.Why is that?Because there's a manifesto commitment not to do that.And his problem is, is the moment he starts breaking manifesto commitments, that's when there is a reasonable demand that he must go to a general election.

So he's boxing himself in.A third problem I have with this whole Thatcher narrative is Manchester is not the entire north.I've just spent my holiday in Yorkshire and Northumberland.Manchester is actually quite southern compared to that.And in many regards, central Manchester is really a suburb of London.And I'm just tired of hearing the history of Manchester is the history of the entire country in the whole of the north and parts of the north by the way voted for Margaret Thatcher and final point on all this Thatcher bashing which we're doing.

Not me.You'll never see me Thatcher bash.

Final point on this is you and I We're of a certain age.

Yes, we are.

And Andy is much older than us.

Yes, so much older.

Like a decade or two older than us.We can remember Margaret Thatcher.

Yes.

Anyone under, let's say, 35, which we're just above, anyone under that hasn't got a clue what he's talking about.And we always talk and joke about reform being stuck in about the 1950s, because they're always banging on about the war.The Labour Party is stuck in 1984.And I've no idea why.

Because it hasn't had an original idea since then.

It really hasn't.And Britain has moved on so dramatically.And you can see that, by the way, in the parts of the North I've been in, where, to be fair, there is a revolution in green energy going on, where new high -tech blue -collar jobs of the future are being created by private enterprise.You might argue you can even see it in public -private partnerships in places like Manchester, which, by the way, has been transformed by gentrification.by Chinese capital flooding in, by overseas investment.

By Tory money, but George Osborne ploughed a great deal of money into Manchester.

They're not opening textile factories for heaven's sake, they are opening call centres, they are opening new office space.So the model he has in his head, his historical narrative, is one that is very out of date,and which also, crucially, young people watching this must not have a clue what we're all talking about.And I feel so sorry for them that our generation, or his, is stuck in this groundhog day of thinking everything is a constant re -litigation of the Thatcher years.Stop it.Move on.

Things have happened since then.

The other danger as well, I think, is that This whole, well, we want to have everybody living in prosperity, no matter what their postcode, doesn't feel cogent when he keeps on banging on about how disadvantaged the North is compared to the South.So he's saying that he's trying to bridge divides and he's trying to unite the country.Well, it's very difficult to unite the country if you actually invited them to have a say over whether you should run it or not.And secondly, I feel like he's now creating a North -South divide.Like he's now making it this idea that the South needs to pay for improvements to the North.And I'm not sure that really works.

And by the way, just on your point about He doesn't represent the whole of the North.He doesn't represent Newcastle.I interviewed a Scottish Labour MP, Melanie Ward, on my GB News show on Sunday, who was calling for more devolution.I said, sorry, how much?There's much more devolution to the Scots one.What happened is you got full devolution and the Scots turned around and said we'd rather have the Nats.

We'd rather have the Nats than Labour.

So it failed.So he represents a wealthy city in the north.He also doesn't represent Scotland or Wales where Labour was almost wiped out in the local elections.Those places are now voting for the Celtic Nationalists or they're voting for reform.So this historical narrative that Labour clings to like a rubber dinghy, they've fallen into the sea and they're just clinging on to this rubber dinghy shouting Margaret Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher.That historical narrative has been swept away by the voters in the parts of the country where it used to be definitional.

They are voting for people like Nigel Farage.How do you get your head around that if your bogeyman is Margaret Thatcher?

Also, you don't make your bogeyman or woman Margaret Thatcher.in the week that Argentina, probably the most cheating team in the history of the World Cup, has junked us in a semi -final, gone on to attack Spanish players who they lost to in the actual final.You know, actually Margaret Thatcher in the last few days, if young people have heard of her, was the one who didn't bottle it against Argentina.So I'm not sure she's the right person to be making into some kind of career criminal right now.

Yeah, that match was on the telly by the way while I was away and my family did put it on so I heard it but I was playing Monopoly by myself.

You're playing Monopoly by yourself, gathering all of the hotels.

Totally unmoved.

Taking over Park Lane one hotel at a time.So we've been here a long time Tim, it feels like Forever.Forever.

Not just hours but weeks and years.

Indeed.And coming up next we're going to be discussing Keir Starmer's final farewell outside the big number 10 door.Earlier Tim, in what turned out to be a very busy day in Downing Street, you're here with the world's smallest notebook.

Could you have got a smaller one?I can always slip it into my pocket, you see, if I need to drop my bag and go sort of combat.

We were doing Starmer bingo earlier.We were, and it was all there.He concluded, my work here is done.

Is it?

I mean, you know, I don't see charging by the hour.

Surrounded by allies, including David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, and the tiny Sadiq Khan.

Tiny man.

Dressed by mother care.The prime minister came out to a round of hearty applause.and ran through his many achievements.It took about four and a half minutes.They began with his election in 2024, overturning the historic defeat of 2019.He then said it was

the privilege of my life to govern this country, a phrase he likes to use a lot.

Yes, but it's not the first time he's said that.

He talked about lifting millions of children out of poverty and, crucially, passing on the baton to Andy Burnham, naming his successor there as he leaves.And he said, I go with good grace.I go with a smile.

Let's have a little listen to what he actually said.Vic and our children, my team, all the staff here and across the Labour Party, everyone at number 10 and across the civil service and everyone who has supported our efforts along the way.I thank the British people for the opportunity to serve.I go with good grace, I go with a smile and I go proud of everything that we have achieved.Thank you very much.

I mean, he then gets taken off in an Audi with his wife, Lady Starmer, both looking very glamorous, looking quite chipper, to be honest.I did speak to a very, very close ally of his earlier here, who was coming to wave him off.And I said, look, how is he feeling?Is he angry?Is he frustrated?She said he feels relieved, because this whole farrago has been going on not just for weeks, but for months now.

And I feel like he felt like he was having knives stabbed in his back.back and he just couldn't take it anymore.And actually, I think that was also the case with Sunak.It's almost these two men who are a bit...They don't really belong here.They're decent men who should never have been in politics because it's a brutal game.

Look at us back here yet again.How long's the new guy going to last?

Richard Sunak should have been running an enormous pharmacy, a very big one.

Yes.

And Keir Starmer should have been running an enormous legal firm.That's right.They shouldn't have been in frontline politics.But Starmer has been dropping hints about potential weaknesses in Burnham's leadership, saying he's got to think about foreign policy, which is something Burnham has said nothing about, as far as I'm aware.

And it had been discussed over the weekend, could Burnham do a Sunak and a point Keir Starmer as the Foreign Secretary, because he has got some degree of global standing and there are concerns about the special relationship and Donald Trump and all the rest of it.And then again, just to quote that ally, absolutely not.Keir Starmer, while he may be saying publicly, I support Andy Burnham, who I'm going to name check.And he had made that point at PMQs.I'm not going to be somebody who offers an opinion when not invited and then gives one behind his back.So he's going to be quietly going back to the back benches and campaigning presumably for local issues in North London, he's absolutely not accepting any cabinet post.

And we are going to do the runners and riders and reshuffles, but I'm hearing increasingly at this point in the day, bearing in mind I'm going to be overtaken by events, Ed Miliband might become the new Foreign Secretary.

I think we should give Keir Starmer some credit.He is only the fourth Labour Prime Minister to win a landslide election.And it was an enormous one.And it came off the back of the 2019 election.Much of what he said in there was really aimed at the Labour Party, lifting children out of poverty, getting us into office.Much as we've said about Andy Burnham, it's all really an internal conflict.

within the left.It's not reaching out to the country.But in terms of Labour's own history, you have to give Keir Starmer credit for winning that election and doing it by making the Labour Party take positions it was not comfortable with, be it reconciling to Brexit, wanting to control the borders, or trying to balance the books.We would say balancing the books by tax raids on business, But nonetheless, an element of fiscal discipline that wasn't there before.Remember Ed Miliband saying he didn't think Labour had spent too much money in 2015 and a Question Time audience laughing at him.That's where Labour was coming from.

Keir Starmer achieved that.That's what he'll be principally remembered for.Not for how he governed as Prime Minister, but how he got Labour into office.

that he managed to restore the reputation of a party that had been absolutely sullied by institutional anti -Semitism.I mean, that was an independent finding under Jeremy Corbyn.Although, let's not completely rewrite history here, because the person that slayed Corbyn was not Starmer, it was Boris Johnson.Yeah, that's true.And that's the truth of the matter.Although Starmer then kicked Corbyn out of the party.

I know he did, but it was down to...The country decided in 2019, do we want this guy that's overseeing a party where Jewish MPs have been forced out, along with members, or don't we?

But this is also a Labour Party that's trying to govern while the Muslim vote was rebelling against it.So he had to walk this terribly tight, tight rope between Palestine and Israel.I don't think any leader could have pulled that off.

But I'm just making the Corbyn point because there is a continuity issue here.Starmer propped up Corbyn for four years.So did Andy Burnham.He happily served under him.And by the way, when it comes to his economic policies, what has Jeremy Corbyn of Magic Money Tree fame said about Burnham's policies, oh, I'm surprisingly optimistic.Socialism coming soon.

government near you folks.This is fun.Guess who Andy Burnham's first phone calls are going to be with when it comes to the world stage, Tim?

Well, the only two countries that matter now.Ukraine and America.

Indeed.So one call to Zelensky.

Ukraine's flag is flying above Britain, above number 10 up there.

Exactly.So a discussion with Zelensky, presumably about the war, but also just like, where does he get his black t -shirts?And can he recommend them?And then the Donald, who thinks that Andy Burnham is, quote, very liberal.They're going to have a chat.But didn't Donald Trump say something quite positive about our new prime minister over the weekend?

He liked the idea, funnily enough, of Burnham going full drill, baby drill.

Yeah, he doesn't understand that he's not.

No, he's not.

new drill, not new drilling, it's the ones we've already got on the go.Yeah, yeah, yeah.Well, as Andy Burnham's odyssey comes to an end, he enters Number 10, or Ithaca, to fight off the suitors.

That's right, and we are going to be bringing news of his new top team tomorrow.We will do the full cabinet reshuffle, who's in, who's out, and what they hope to achieve as Manchesterism finally comes to London.

I feel like we're dressed for a Greek island, actually.

Should we go to a Greek island?Do you know what?I'm going to a Greek island in about seven days' time.

Do you like pina colada and dancing in the rain?

Yes, I do.

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