How Andy Burnham could be this Government’s last hope - David Behrens
What would Britain look like today if Labour had chosen Andy Burnham to replace the defeated and deflated Gordon Brown 15 years ago? It could have happened: he had Cabinet experience both as Health and Culture Secretary and he might have spared us the Cameron premiership that gambled our future on the roulette wheel of a referendum.
The history of party leadership then and since has been one catastrophe after another, on both sides of the House: Ed Miliband, Jeremy Corbyn, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and let’s not even mention Liz Truss. Neither of the present incumbents is likely to still be in post come the next election.
Burnham must have seen it coming. Since his second tilt at the leadership in 2015, when he was a distant runner-up to Corbyn, he has been treading water in the municipal pool of Greater Manchester and has managed as elected mayor to be both effective and popular, at least by the low standards against which we judge our politicians.
But now he seems ready to resurface in Westminster, with the hint of a timely by-election in the offing and a divided parliamentary party desperate for change. If I were a betting man I would chance a fiver on him being PM by this time next year.
In the present climate he is this government’s last hope. Sir Keir Starmer may have been a steadying hand for his party in opposition but he is neither the leader nor the orator it needs to counter the threat from outside the political mainstream, from ‘bad actors’ who don’t play by traditional rules. The same is true of Kemi Badenoch: she and Starmer are feathers in a hurricane.
Just how wild the wind is blowing became clear last weekend with the triumphal arrival of a visitor from America – not the President but an even more dangerous provocateur.
Elon Musk is one of the world’s smartest men and also the most ignorant. It’s hard to believe that this manipulative manufacturer of overpriced electric cars was until three years ago on the left of American politics. Yet here he was, bankrolling and supporting a gathering of the hard right in London. It was like Henry Ford turning up to support Hitler at Nuremberg.
It was a rally built on a lie. The figurehead was not a real person but a character of his own invention. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, whose many criminal convictions include assault, using a fake passport and mortgage fraud, performs in public as a fictitious ‘man of the people’ called Tommy Robinson, in the same way people perform as Ronald McDonald at children’s parties. He is as artificial as Stan Ogden, Dirty Den or Bugs Bunny, yet the 100,000 people who came to hear him last Saturday hung on his every word.
That makes him 100,000 times more dangerous than either Keir Starmer or Kemi Badenoch realise.
Musk appeared at his rally in Whitehall on a video link and, though he appeared unable to string two sentences together in a coherent fashion, he egged on the mob with just 10 words: “Violence is coming. You either fight back or you die.” The crowd liked that. Violence is a language they understand.
If ever there was an opportunity for someone else to seize the moral high ground, this was it. But the main parties could not find the words. The Business Secretary Peter Kyle said you couldn’t tar everyone at the rally with the same brush. Perhaps not, but you could cut them in two: inherent bigots and those merely made to look like bigots.
The episode marked a new low point in British politics. It was us against them, whoever ‘they’ are; it was war or peace.
This polarisation is a US import we don’t want. American politics, especially on the right, is predicated on the notion that If you say something often enough and loud enough, people will start to believe it, irrespective of whether it has any basis in fact. It goes like this: we’re being overrun; we must take our country back; war is coming. These are things people want to believe. Not all people, of course, but enough.
Yet they want to believe other things, too. Even the 100,000 who think ‘Tommy Robinson’ is a real person also want to hear that the measures which most closely affect their lives are improving; that inflation is coming down, the NHS is working and, yes, that immigration is under control. Neither Starmer nor Badenoch has owned this narrative and that will be their downfall.
Can a relatively ‘normal’ politician like Andy Burnham succeed where they have failed? I sincerely hope so because the alternative is an apocalyptic scenario in which Nigel Farage and Robert Jenrick suddenly seem like moderates.