Old Big ‘Ead made a cameo in my Times column this week. Or rather his great mentor Harry Storer did. It was Storer, Clough’s predecessor-but-one as boss of Derby, who gave the young son of the Infant Hercules this unromantic insight into the dissatisfying psychological reality of football management: “Nobody ever says thank you.” (Hence the title of Jonathan Wilson’s much-praised life of Clough.)

The lesson was this: seeking affirmation from the terraces or gratitude from the boardroom is a mug’s game. There’s always another cup tie to win, player to sign, whatever. No matter how high you take them, in the end, nobody ever says thank you – so don’t expect them to. You’ll only be driven to disappointment, and then madness. I think Storer’s mantra is a good way of understanding the difference between Sir Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham.

Subscribe to The Times

The other instructive quote is this, from Burnham himself: “I just don’t think the public are going to believe that.” No individual issue has taken up as much of his first three weeks as prime minister as the early release scheme. Once again he is attempting to prove, after two years of passivity, that a Labour government can listen to the public and give effect to a least a little of what it is asking for.

Fittingly, since I mention Storer and Clough and the former’s entreaties against taking fan sentiment as a reliable measure of one’s worth, we should remind ourselves that Burnham learned this particular lesson standing in front of the Kop in 2009 – as I wrote last week.

The people say they want something, in that case justice for the Hillsborough dead. The validity and moral urgency of the cause is obvious – obvious, at least, to everyone but the politicians. At first you ask politely, you try again, and again, and again, and then you get angry. Still nothing meaningful is done and you give up on beliving in the power of politics entirely. At most you might be told it’s awfully sad but awfully difficult. At worst you are ignored and demeaned and treated as a nuisance.

And so the democratic conversation becomes a cycle of pain and condescension, doubling back on itself again and again until Andy Burnham – still, in his heart, the boy who was at the other FA Cup semi-final that weekend in April 1989 – stands before thousands of men and women just like him and realises he has become a faceless spokesman for the unaccountable state.

So, sure – in politics, as in football, nobody really says thank you in the end. Enoch Powell said as much and Winston Churchill learned as much in 1945. Indeed, Churchill didn’t get a proper, unambiguous thank you until he was dead. There was much about politics that Starmer never understood, but this he did. Nobody ever says thank you, so don’t be misled into crowd-pleasing promises by the forlorn hope that you might be able to convince them to.

As I write in the column:

Starmer’s government was forced to take hard and unpopular decisions because of its inheritance, that much is true, but their unpopularity was no less of a political risk. He internalised too much of Storer’s mantra too quickly. Nobody ever says thank you, so there’s no point pretending I can do anything else.

“He’d have scoffed at saying we were going to stop it,” says a former aide of Starmer on early release, “because, he’d say, we’ll be back doing it very soon anyway.” The result was a government that looked as if it had given up on itself. It promised change but too often delivered passivity.

Burnham takes the opposite view. Officials and experts might tell you something is impossible – what the “right thing” is – but that’s no reason not to try. Actually, if you are told something can’t be done, like exempting this class of offenders or that from early release, that’s a good reason to demand the opposite. Back to that other instructive quote in my column, from Burnham himself. Last week he told some of those officials and experts:

I just don’t think the public are going to believe that. They’re not going to thank me for that.

To that the Starmerites privately say: of course they’re not going to thank you! They never do! Especially not when you’re releasing some really bad people from prison after you made such a song and dance of saying you didn’t want to! You’ve made a rod for your own back! You keep having to do things that keep it in the news! You promise a review on groomers and PC Harper’s killers and then end up saying you can’t do anything! It’s all on you now! They’re not going to thank you!

The critics might have a point. One loyal cabinet minister compares the somewhat muted reaction to early releases in 2024 to this last noisy fortnight and wonders whether Burnham’s decision to intervene personally has ended up increasing its salience and thus the political damage the government could end up incurring. On X, meanwhile, Tom Baldwin, biographer to Keir, highlighted this paragaph as illustrative of the attitude gap between the two leaders.

What comes next is the first big test case for Burnhamism. The new style has collided with the old substance. As the prime minister himself says, he has not kept anywhere near as many criminals inside as he, or the public, would have liked. Starmer’s own preference, incidentally, was to authorise the early releases himself before leaving office. He thought it might make his successor’s life a little easier, and help save Labour’s face come inevitable disappointment. The offer was declined because Burnham, as he told me the day before he entered No 10, is “going to try to do things in a different way”.

Starmer thought an unpopular solution to the crisis of prison capacity was inevitable and so offered to rescue Burnham from a mugging by reality. Burnham would call that fatalistic and wrong. Once again, the politician is reduced to a press officer for the unaccountable state.

Burnham might yet end up in more or less exactly the same place as his predecessor. But at least the public will have noted that he agrees with them – sincerely shares their revulsion – and then watched him try to push the system to deliver what they want. The huffing and puffing and disappointment and thwarted persistence is the point of this demonstrative, emotional politics. Early release is its biggest test yet.

Now listen

This week’s episode of The State of It was mostly about Reform UK and the Greens. Is the insurgent era of British politics already over?

Subscribe to The State of It

They would say this, wouldn’t they, but Teams Farage and Polanski both say no. The latter are planning to attack Burnham on the cost-of-living, inequality and – remember this? – the environment. Like early release, actually, it’s a test of whether Labour’s new vibes can trump the largely unchanged substance of its policy programme. Or, conversely, whether the issue is actually just Polanski himself.

There will be more time to dwell on Reform next week, after Farage wins his landslide in Clacton. But, as I wrote with colleagues in yesterday’s Times politics read, Reform’s leadership are now, if anything, more confident than ever that they are underpriced by the Westminster consensus and are preparing to use Thursday as their springboard into a long, loud, summer campaign. Clacton has given them a lot of data and a much greater sense of how they intend to communicate with their electorate: which is to say largely over and around the heads of journalists like me.

As one of his intimates said to me earlier this week: “Nigel is back.” So, two things to test in the coming weeks: the first is how Burnham responds to a Reform-driven agenda. The second, as we might also say of the prime minister, is whether the laws of political gravity that are felt most acutely in SW1 apply with equal force out there in the country.

Subscribe to The Times

Recommended reading

I’m really very embarrassed to admit that it’s taken me until this week to read Eminent Victorians. I can’t believe I’ve co-written two books on people and politics without having read this. I can’t believe I’ve been literate for more than a quarter of a century without having read this before now. Perversely, quite unbelievably good – and laugh-out-loud funny – for something written in 1918. It feels considerably more contemporary than most biographies I read now.

To offer this room-temperature insight as a revelation is itself embarrassing as Strachey’s form-shattering influence will be well-known to anyone who’s already read this. If you haven’t, and go on to try, it mightn’t be immediately obvious. We’ve all met that specific kind of idiot who complains that The Beatles sound “generic”, or whatever, but I suppose unless you were there, subsisting on a diet of Perry Como, it’s hard to truly appreciate the shock of the new. Has any literary mission statement been as enduringly influential – and genuinely subversive – as Strachey’s preface?

The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. We have had, it is true, a few masterpieces, but we have never had, like the French, a great biographical tradition; we have had no Fontenelles and Condorcets, with their incomparable eloges, compressing into a few shining pages the manifold existences of men. With us, the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one. Those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead – who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design? They are as familiar as the cortege of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism.

And so he tells the stories of his “ecclesiastic, an educational authority, a woman of action, and a man of adventure” – Cardinal Manning, Dr Arnold, Florence Nightingale and General Gordon – without deference to the old pomposities. Or, indeed, to the subjects themselves.

To preserve, for instance, a becoming brevity – a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant – that, surely, is the first duty of the biographer. The second, no less surely, is to maintain his own freedom of spirit. It is not his business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them. That is what I have aimed at in this book-- to lay bare the facts of some cases, as I understand them, dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions. To quote the words of a Master – ‘Je n’impose rien; je ne propose rien: j’expose.’

It’s as if someone has handed you the master key for modern non-fiction. Strachey on the Manning is at once – surely – the most scarbrous and irreverent thing any serious writer had then written about any man of cloth in England ever, and a hilarious but by no means unserious brief history of Tractarianism, the Oxford Movement, the First Vatican Council and much else. You come to understand the fullness of the historical context – the great, powerful sweep of this force or that – but never lose sight of the human smallness of even the biggest characters. This kind of paragraph, on Manning, is what I’m talking about.

The Church of England is a commodious institution; she is very anxious to please, but somehow or other, she has never manage to supply a happy home to superstitious egotists.

Or this, on the dysfunction of the War Office that Nightingale sought to reform with near-psychotic intensity, and the death and devastation it tolerated in Crimea.

In the inquiries which followed, it was clearly shown that the evil was in reality that worst of all evils—one which has been caused by nothing in particular and for which no one in particular is to blame.

This, on the military hospital at Scutari, reminds me of how Labour spads came to describe their experience of the state by, say, early 2025.

To replace such wants, to struggle against such difficulties, there was a handful of men overburdened by the strain of ceaseless work, bound down by the traditions of official routine, and enfeebled either by old age or inexperience or sheer incompetence. They had proved utterly unequal to their task. The principal doctor was lost in the imbecilities of a senile optimism. The wretched official whose business it was to provide for the wants of the hospital was tied fast hand and foot by red tape. A few of the younger doctors struggled valiantly, but what could they do?

Anyway, I really could quote the whole thing and am now in danger of doing so. Instead, read it yourself if, like me, you haven’t already. If you have, re-read it. Everyone else has been trying and failing to rewrite this book for 108 years. The original is still the unbeatable best.

Quicker reads

• Lovely Sunday Times interview with Jack Charlton’s son, John, on inheritance tax, babysitting Paul McGrath, Roy Keane’s ingratitude, and how a trip to Harry Ramsden’s cost Ireland their place at Euro 96.

• I think Krissi Murrison’s piece on editing Rod Liddle is probably the best of the bunch, not least to understand something of how it feels to have a columnist prevaricate on the other end of the phone.

• Not so quick, this one but the trailer for the new Chris Hansen biopic sent me down a chain of Wikipedia links that ended with this 2009 Esquire long-read – the kind of American feature that feels rarer and rarer now – on the To Catch A Predator sting that ended with the on-camera suicide of a Texas district attorney.

Sadchester

There now follows an obsveration so impossibly boring that I can actually feel my body trying to stop me typing it out. As a compromise I’ll do so in the most perfunctory way possible. The original version of Sit Down by James is finally on Spotify. When it was re-released in 1991 it was corrupted into something rockier and poppier and thus infinitely more successful than this 1989 Rough Trade version (UK singles chart #77).

Less Madchester than Sadchester – and in the lighter, rougher, ever-so-slightly plinky-plonky instrumentation and Tim Booth’s raw vocals you get everything that is blasted out of the noisy version that became a club and chart smash: pain, vulnerability, sincerity. It’s nice that this lacuna in the catalogue has at last been filled and I can at last listen to this on my phone. Anyway, I’m glad I’ve got that off my chest. See you next week.

Subscribe to The Times

In my Times column this week I explain why Andy Burnham is – in his words – willing to spend so much political capital on social care. Put the abject state of the sector aside for a moment, as governments have done repeatedly for thirty years, and the perverse but powerful incentive for any prime minister is to leave well alone. After all, any meaningful solution will inevitably involve the outlay of actual capital – lots and lots of it – and the process of finding that promises lots and lots of political pain.

So why is Burnham doing it? Part of the reason is personal, though of course his own family’s experience of the care sector is by no means uncommon. That, after all, is why someone, at some point, is going to have to solve this thing once and for all. A couple of weeks ago, when I interviewed him on the eve of his arrival in No 10, he told me of his father’s dementia and the faint shadow of sadness it would cast over the next day’s jubilation.

Roy Burnham is not a Catholic, but he is a Labour man, always — the “most political” of Burnham’s parents. It was he, really, who set him off: on a drive from Culcheth to Chester Zoo, not long after the 1979 election. On the car in front of them, a sticker: “Don’t blame me, I voted Labour.” Burnham asked Roy what the words meant. “Well,” he said, “there’s this woman called Maggie Thatcher…”

Roy cannot now know that his son, as prime minister, was now committed to overturning every wrong he thought Thatcher had done to his native city of Liverpool: to the broken industries and their workers, like the striking miners Burnham passed at Parkside colliery, beside his school in Newton-le-Willows. Roy was always “very much to the left” of his famous son. His illness has denied him the sweetest victory of all — learning that Burnham has converted, if only relatively late in life, to the cause of proportional representation (PR).

His boy says he is relaxed, happy — at last confident and comfortable in his own skin. But even Burnham’s moment of personal triumph, dismissed a thousand times as impossible by the critics he insists do not understand him, will be discoloured a little by sadness. “We were with him last Sunday,” said Burnham. “We were at his care home. My two brothers were there, my mum was there. So, all five of us together, which was a nice thing.” His youngest daughter joined them.

Burnham is less sad than stoical. So many British families will recognise their own story in his. He slows down. “We were talking about it, but I wish I could say whether it was …”

The one thing he says he will not do in office is pretend, or dissemble, or find a neat, expedient phrase for the sake of it. It would be easier to demur now, on this most personal of questions, but he doesn’t. “I don’t think he’s ever realised, because of his condition, that I’ve come round to PR, which is one of his missions — to get me to accept that.”

But this moment will belong to Roy too. “It’s a family achievement … although he doesn’t know it, it still makes me feel that we’ve kind of done something together.”

On his way up from Westminster to Jewish Care in Golders Green on Wednesday morning, Burnham rang his mum. They spoke about his dad, and then he told the country about him too. So, yes, it is to some extent personal – but he won’t be the last middle-aged prime minister to have their own story to tell on this front. But what his decision to prioritise social care reform really reveals – or distils – is his critique of state failure and economic dysfunction.

As I explain in the column:

Policy wonks like to talk about the “housing theory of everything”. Point at a problem with the British economy — stagnant growth, low productivity, wealth inequality, overstated GDP — and the explanation lies in our dysfunctional housing market. If Burnhamism has an equivalent it is surely social care. To the prime minister, it looks like a twisted bundle of original sins: petty partisanship, privatisation and the death of municipal England. Untangle it, the argument goes, and you absolve the state of debts and obligations it ought never to have incurred in the first place. Fix this, finally, and all else no longer seems impossible.

Social care reform allows – requires – him to confront those three original sins head on.

1. Petty partisanship. So much of what Burnham is saying and doing now, as prime minister, is informed by what he couldn’t do – felt he shouldn’t have done, did too late – as a New Labour cabinet minister. 2009 and 2010 are particularly formative. The heckles of the Kop over Hillsborough, the Tories kicking his “death tax” to bits and wrecking any chance of cross-party care reform: both told him politics as usual was incapable of delivering the change for which people were really desperate. Much of what has followed in Greater Manchester and now Westminster can be traced back to those two episodes. As James Purnell put it in a note to No 10 staff this week, this PM has a real “determination to do politics differently”.

2. Privatisation. Burnham’s theory of power – which I wrote about in The Times and on here the other week – is that privatisation, austerity and centralisation have created an “unaccountable state”. And what is less accountable, or subject to public control, than whatever our care sector now is? From the column: “What we have now is a mess of patchy and overstretched local authority services, charities and private providers — owned, in many cases, by American venture capital and private equity funds… if Burnham’s vision of England has an opposite, it is surely BlackRock making a handsome profit off your nan.”

3. The death of municipal England. Simple enough: councils are broke and forced into unpopular, trust-sapping cuts to service provision once taken for granted by residents – and, for that matter, into selling off the things people care about – because their statutory obligations reduce them to little more than adult social care providers.

Former cabinet ministers are grumbling privately that Keir Starmer was doing this anyway, and that, in the end, politics won’t be done differently by a Conservative leader who will surely, surely just attack a Labour government for trying to raise taxes in a very old-fashioned way. We shall see when Louise Casey comes back with her report next year. But if you want to understand Burnham, his politics and priorities, and the emergent rhythm of his premiership, the care sector is a good place to start.

The wool exchange

Jonny Ball wrote a great piece in UnHerd the other week. The only mark it lost was for the headline: “Andy Burnham’s potemkin radicalism.” It ought to have just said: “Andy Burnham is a wool”. If you don’t know what that means, it’s what Scousers like Jonny call people like me – from Southport, or Formby, Runcorn, Widnes or anywhere else in Liverpool’s orbit that isn’t actually Liverpool.

Burnham was born in Liverpool but the standard biography of his life notes he moved to Culcheth, near Warrington, as a boy. He went to school in Newton-le-Willows. I think most Scousers would agree there is no such thing as birthright citizenship so this, I am afraid, is just pure wool. It’s what the godawful impressions of him doing the rounds get wrong. There’s a Liverpudlian inflection to this south Lancashire voice – how strong it is depends what kind of wool you are – but it’s not Scouse. And it’s definitely not Manc either. It’s certainly not the sub-Ringo drawl one comedian is trying to popularise.

I digress but if I don’t call out this pernicious wool erasure, nobody will. Anyway: I was intrigued to see Bill Esterson, Labour MP for Sefton Central, tweet a video on Friday that Burnham had spent some time living in Formby as a kid.

I hadn’t seen any reference to this before. Presumably because it would leave Burnham with no plausible claim to be anything other than a wool. But that’s nothing to be ashamed of.

Now listen

For one week only, Gabriel Pogrund returned to the State of It on Tuesday. It was just the two of us, with much to discuss. Was this the week – as The Guardian mistakenly said of a Thursday in April 2015 – that the polls turned?

Subscribe to The State of It

Some of them have, if not that decisively, in Burnham’s favour. I was on the Times news pages on Tuesday morning reporting on a couple of them: YouGov had Labour level-pegging with Reform, More in Common recorded a four-point lead and called the Greater Manchester mayoral contest as a landslide for Bev Craig. Survation has Labour two points ahead of Reform, BMG five. FindOutNow and Deltapoll both have the two parties level.

Labour on the up, and strolling home in Greater Manchester. Reform dipping beneath 25 per cent. The Greens in freefall. All unthinkable six months ago, when Burnham had been blocked from running in Gorton and Denton and allies of Sir Keir Starmer were telling me, sincerely, that the then mayor was willing to “put fascists in charge of Greater Manchester Police” so long as he scratched his parliamentary itch.

Look beneath the bonnet of almost every poll published in the last week and the same story recurs: Burnham is squeezing the Greens and the Lib Dems and reuniting at least some of the electorate’s progressive family. If this is sustained – particularly that Green decline – the really interesting question is what it does to discourse on the right.

Earlier this week I spoke to a Reform strategist who argued that a run in second place needn’t be a bad thing. The optimistic case: less internal pressure from Tory defectors to moderate and cost populist policy, particularly on economics, and a chance to recapture Farage’s old insurgent energy.

Eventually, election results will prove the Conservatives are still a much diminished if not moribund force in most of the country – see the Norfolk police and crime commissioner election earlier this month – and eventually voters on the right will twig that, in all but a few dozen constituencies, the most straightforward way to eject what may yet turn out to be an effective Labour government is to vote Reform.

As I say at greater length in the podcast, I think this argument is worth taking seriously even as Farage continues to endure a noisy, scratchy few months: there are few signs that Reform’s core vote is disappearing. If anything, his closest allies say, the perception of an all-out establishment assault on their man may well lock it down.

But it all depends on them staying in second. The pessimistic case from smart Reformers is that the only guarantee of that is a wholesale change in approach – back towards a catch-all, vibes-led populism. Is it too late?

Breaking the curse

If you know nothing of the GAA or indeed Ireland, I recommend reading this New Statesman essay on the emigrant’s experience of the All-Ireland final by Luke O’Reilly. Reflective, humane, exquisitely observed. Much for the Irish in Britain – whether you are two generations removed from the boat or none from the plane – to recognise here. This, I thought, was particularly well put:

In the US, Irishness has a habit of surviving the generations. In England it dissolves like salt in water. Given enough time, it disappears, only leaving behind a slightly sharpened aftertaste.

And this paragraph, on the now-broken Mayo curse, reminded me very much of one of the first books I read this year: the 1998 second edition of Moral Monopoly, Tom Inglis’s in-depth study of how Ireland became Catholic and how that Catholicism, in turn, was uniquely Irish. It’s occasionally heavy-going and a little repetitious, as academic books sometimes are, but still very much worth reading if you care to go beyond moralism and cliché. Inglis I mean, not O’Reilly. Anyway:

The version I grew up with mixes the pagan with the Christian, the priest taking a role just as easily filled by a witch. Irish Catholicism has deeper roots than those dug by the monks who first came here. Saints and holidays were plastered over pagan gods and feasts. The same people who prayed the rosary every day would refuse to cut down a whitethorn tree. One of our patron saints, St Brigid, shares the same name, and much of the same story, with a Celtic goddess. Scratch the spiritual and the supernatural lies just beneath the surface. But as the years following the curse passed, the country changed around it. Ireland became richer, more progressive and less inclined to accept stories about broken funeral rites. With the curse’s end, another small piece of old Ireland slips away.

Inglis writes of three kinds of Irish Catholicism: magical-devotional (see above), legalistic-orthodox and individually-principled. It’s the first, as O’Reilly says, that probably left the stickiest cultural residue in rural Ireland: not for nothing did Edna O’Brien call one of her novels on girlhood in the country A Pagan Place. The popular legitimacy of the second took a largely deserved battering in the last couple of decades of the 20th Century. The third, with all the latitude and selectivity implied by the words “individual” and “principle”, is surely most common these days – certainly among the Irish in Britain.

See the prime minister, for one.

Couldn’t have put it better myself

This, from William Davies’ Substack, might be the best single-paragraph summary I’ve read on why Starmer failed.

If Starmer offers anything to political theory, it’s as a kind of ‘negative political theology’, an avatar of what happens when politics is denied, refused or relegated. Starmer’s absence could be felt and witnessed across three different aspects of political leadership: appetite, destination, ideology. It wasn’t clear why he wanted to be Prime Minister (appetite), it wasn’t clear what he wanted to do with power (destination) and it wasn’t clear why or with what justification he wanted to get there (ideology). It was this triple vacuum that made him such a bewildering figure, psychologically as much as politically. There weren’t even any significant stories of psychological frailty, sensitivity, rage or rupture, that usually leak out from centres of political power, simply because politicians are such unusual psychological specimens. It felt like there was no there there.

The full piece, which applies this same analysis to other prime ministers, is very much worth your time. See you next week.

That’s something Andy Burnham told me last weekend. He knows the policies he has announced since taking office on Monday won’t provide “overnight” solutions to the cost of living crisis. “But you’ve got to show people where we’re going, and then the steps towards it. And that’s what I’m going to try to do.”

So please try to take this one-off Saturday notebook in that spirit. Apologies to all.

Anyway, you won’t be surprised to read that my column in yesterday’s Times was about the first four of the prime minister’s first 100 days – and what they might tell us about the coming 96.

Read in full: subscribe to The Times

The first thing I should say about this piece is that the headline tells only part of the story, which is about the what and the how of Burnham’s plans for office.

In my many conversations with Labour people of varying loyalty and emotional stability this week, there has been one point of consensus. This prime minister, unlike the last one, is crystal clear on the what of government. By extension, he’s just as unambiguous on the why.

The point of this government is to provide what mitigation – “breathing room” – it can possibly give within the confines of the 2024 manifesto in the short term. In the longer term, as per his plan for a “ten-year plan” he promised The Times and then the country in the space of 24 hours last week, it is to remake the British state entirely.

Once that’s eventually done, he argues, cheaper energy and bus fares and ever lively flat-roof pubs can be permanent fixtures of a democratised, thriving economy. So there it is – the what, and the why. How about the how?

The answer to this one comes in two halves, and is best told from inside No 10 – or at least its London branch office. Reshaping the state is both the ends and the means of this political project. The way Burnham is doing so is a little paradoxical. He’s all about devolution and decantralisation, yes. But he’s started by concentrating as much power as he can in his own hands.

It’s best understood via Antonia Romeo’s new desk. The cabinet secretary now has a seat in the outer office in No 10 – right outside the prime minister’s study. It’s the Sandbanks of political real estate: a hyper-exclusive compound of pure power. I asked some of her predecessors whether this was usual practice. They said no. Indeed, the fact the sight surprised people in Downing Street is how I ended up finding out.

As I write in the column:

Antonia Romeo has a new desk. And while the cabinet secretary’s grand designs for the British state go well beyond office furniture, this small point of reorganisation tells us quite a bit about Andy Burnham’s young government. As of this week, Romeo has her own seat in No 10’s outer office: the most exclusive patch of administrative real estate on Downing Street. The head of the civil service can work — will work — from just outside the prime minister’s study, whenever she pleases.

As one grand old man of Whitehall notes, not even Jeremy Heywood, the most formidable cabinet secretary of recent history, ever pulled a move like this. But Romeo’s desk in No 10 is the very essence of this new administration and how it intends to reclaim the power that bled slowly from Sir Keir Starmer’s office over two torturous years. The first and most important principle of how our new rulers want the state to work is now simple enough. It’s all about Burnham.

So why is she there? There’s no better testament to Romeo’s generational talent for office politics than the fact that her colleagues always mention it, a bit like Burnham’s uncommon ability to position himself in the right place at the right time. It’s sometimes a compliment, sometimes an insult, but it’s never denied. She’s there because the real power in the land is there, and she wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

But that’s happened by design. Burnham and Louise Haigh have reinvented the centre of government – both No 10 and the Cabinet Office – as an ocean-going engine room of pure politics. My column quotes a message from Dan York-Smith, the prime minister’s principal private secretary, in which he explained to Downing Street staff that they’d now find a “smaller department” on the 70 Whitehall side of the link door between No 10 and the Cabinet Office. And as I’ve written before, No 10 North is less an outpost or gimmick than a prime minister tank on the Treasury’s lawn.

Back on Whitehall, Haigh is no longer responsible for the big state bureaucracy and administrative AOB that Cabinet Office ministers had to own in the past – most of that has been hived off to OneGov, a new agency that’ll handle HR functions, government cars, vetting, IT systems and the like. What’s left is, in York-Smith’s words, that “smaller department focussed on the policy and secretariat functions which support the PM and Cabinet”. And No 10, both north and south, is now home – at last – to a proper Office for the Prime Minister and Cabinet. As I wrote yesterday, the machinery of state is now all about Burnham.

Before I go on, a brief apology to the late Jeremy Heywood. You’ll have seen I noted the awed – and a little concerned – reflection of one Whitehall veteran on Romeo’s desk move. Not even Jeremy – formidable, all-powerful, indispensable Jeremy – pulled that kind of stunt, they said.

Helpful clarification landed on Friday morning, via iMessage. A survivor of Gordon Brown’s No 10 wrote to say:

Remember Jeremy Heywood actually put his desk NEXT to Gordon’s in the War Room built in No 12… Antonia has not quite managed that. I’m sure it won’t be long.

As ever with memoirs of that premiership – even those that are sentences long and published only in texts – there was some delightful supplementary colour.

The key thing we got wrong, of course, in that set up, was allowing Gordon to put a massive telly on the wall opposite his desk, permanently tuned to rolling news.

But back then Heywood was Brown’s chief of staff – Gus O’Donnell was cabinet secretary. Come 2010, of course, Jeremy became No 10’s permanent secretary, a post that died a death in 2012 before abortive revivals under Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. Where did he sit then? That’s probably the more relevant question.

Still, a great story.

The other half of the how

No amount of organising and reorganising can save a leader who can’t do the politics. Sir Keir Starmer could have told you that. And if there’s one big unresolved question from week one of the Burnham era, it’s this: can he put this broken Labour Party back together again, or has he inadvertently botched the restoration job like that poor octogenerian who tried to spruce up the fresco of Jesus in Borja?

Burnham’s team hope a nice, long summer break and the eventual return of angry MPs to the loving embrace of a prime minister who’s prepared to treat them like human beings will, in the end, soothe the tempers that have flared so dangerously this week.

But there’s no question that lots of people are upset to the point of nihilism, and not just the Starmerites. Some of the grumpiest backbenchers I spoke to this week were those who backed Burnham early, did their time at Stubshaw Cross, got nothing, and consequently feel let down and screwed over. There’s a big job of work to do now. As the new PM told his new cabinet on Tuesday, these people must be part of the team – and it’s on the cabinet to make them feel integral.

Thus far, the losing side complain, the extent of magnanimity in victory seems to have been limited to a long and heartfelt text from sometime Jacinda Ardern strategist Hayden Munro, Burnham’s political secretary – excerpts from which I published in The Times:

Just on a personal level, as someone who’s been on the other side of this kind of transition back home, I just wanted to say to those of you that have been grinding at this for the last two years: we’re so glad you’re with us. I want to be really clear about this: the only thing I care about is getting this government re-elected. If you’re part of that mission, you’re my comrade and let’s do this.

That passes what I called the Jimmy Reid Test of party management in a post on here the other week: no vandalism, no hooliganism, no bevvying. Ask a Labour MP or special adviser and they’ll tell you that aspects of this transition failed it. There’s time yet to prove otherwise. Steve Swinford and I set out the state of play in the political read in Saturday’s Times if you want more on what’s winding them up.

Subscribe to The Times

Actually existing Starmerism

One final thing on what this week has done to the Labour Party. Has the impossible happened? Does Sir Keir Starmer now have a faction of his own? That was the conclusion of one of his closest allies on Monday evening. They texted me with this very cute observation: Starmer never had a faction of MPs, but Burnham’s first set of appointments might well have succeded in creating one for him.

Put this to the victims of said process and there is a kind of polite disagreement. They identify with that label, up to a point, but would much rather say their only crime was loyalty to the leader of the Labour Party and the embattled government he led. Now they are jobless and the rebels prosper handsomely.

To that, though, the rebels not unreasonably point out that the price of that loyalty – to a singularly unpopular, lose-lose-lose leader almost everyone, including said loyalists, acknowledges was pretty useless as a politician – was Labour’s electoral viability. I find that rebuttal pretty hard to argue with.

This scratchy debate kicked off in earnest when Darren Jones denounced Burnham’s abolition of VAT on energy bills as an unfunded splurge on Tuesday morning. I understand he’ll have much more to say on this theme in September. You can be sure that cabinet refugees like Steve Reed will be up on their hind legs too. Nor, I’m certain, will Rachel Reeves want to fade into obscurity either.

What they say will end up being called Starmerism anyway, even though friends of the recovering PM say he is anxious to avoid people lobbing grenades in his name. After all, he did once say – as Gabriel Pogrund and I revealed in GET IN – that there was “no such thing as Starmerism, and there never will be”.

I’m sure the new guerrillas will point out that their objections are principled rather than personal once hostilities commence, too. From a few conversations on this theme this week, I expect – once the casualties regroup – they will weaponise the following and more.

1. Fiscal responsibility. See Jones.

2. Europe. Particularly if growth still struggles for signs of rude health. Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform noted that cabinet evangelists for closer ties with Brussels mostly lost out – as did Nick Thomas-Symonds, whose old Cabinet Office negotiations brief appears to have been gobbled back up by the FCDO.

3. Immigration. Particularly the impact of asylum hotel closures on Burnham’s rough sleeping mission.

4. Devolution. Every scheme will have its discontents, and there are dispossessed Labour MPs to be found everywhere. Local government reorganisation was unpopular in the PLP anyway, as I wrote last year.

There’s your starter for four, to which you can add broader, vaguer criticisms of loyalty, competence. All in all, it could be quite an intellectually energising time for a section of the Labour right. Just how publicly they enjoy it will depend on how much they really value that loyalty thing.

Now listen

It was another two-episode week for The State of It, our Times and Sunday Times podcast. On Tuesday we ran the rule over the reshuffle and painted a picture of Starmer’s leaving do.

Friday’s installment looked back on what exactly the new team in No 10 was trying to achieve, and whether they succeeded.

I was also on Newcast with Adam Fleming and Lucy Fisher from the FT. Listen to that for what Burnham can learn from the unforeseen challenges of Gordon Brown’s first days in No 10, and a bit of insight on what Nigel Farage has been up to while hacks have been looking the other way.

The full story of the week that was

As told by me in The Times:

• Sunday: Andy Burnham’s last interview before entering No 10.

• Monday: What to make of a surprising, brutal reshuffle – and John Healey as chancellor.

• Thursday: Remaking the state, with a view from inside a divided No 10.

• Friday: ‘Andy Burnham’s chaotic first week is over. Here comes the hard part.’

Something completely different

I loved the obituary for Kevin Keegan in The Times. It occured to me as I read that he was so embedded in the demotic of British culture – I would love it, etc, etc – that I knew much less about him than I should. For those of us born towards the end of the last millennium, and particularly Liverpool fans, he was always there, in the folk memory we inherited, but we never got to see him at his pioneering, fearless best.

So on Thursday I picked up a copy of Anthony Quinn’s slim little biography (or maybe panygeric) from earlier this year. Keegan: The Man Who Was King is barely more than 200 pages long and is thus far an uncomplicated delight to read. Quinn turns a beautiful phrase and manages to convey so much anyone reading this Substack would want to know about the social and economic history of football – and Keegan’s role in shaping it – without ever being windy or boring.

This passage on his first contract negotiation at Liverpool is such a fine example. Not a word wasted.

The only hiccup to the transfer came when they sat down to talk money. Shankly was offering him £45 a week, but Keegan, his dad’s advice tolling in his head (‘Don’t sell yourself cheap’), had a disappointed air. He claimed to be already on a decent wage at Scunthorpe. Shankly asked him whether £50 a week would be acceptable, and the deal was done. The raw recruit, still only twenty, knew his own worth. From that point on he would run his affairs and look after his money with a shrewdness not common among footballers.

Quinn portrays Keegan as George Best’s natural opposite when it came to work and thrift, even though he too was a spontaneous, instinctive player who agreed with Joe Mercer that football should be “a game of pleasure”, and also with Bill Shankly, who described it as a simple game complicated by coaches/idiots/people who should know better.

If you were to serialise the first chapter of the book as a newspaper feature, though, the headline would surely be something like Kevin Keegan: Thatcherite – really he was a lifelong Labour man, the son of a Doncaster miner, but you know what I mean. Maybe Kevin Keegan: Sole Trader is better. As Quinn writes: “He negotiated his own contracts, secured sponsorships, even arranged his own transfers. In an age when footballers were still under the thumb of chairmen and directors, Keegan was out on his own as a businessman.”

When Bobby Robson took over as England manager in 1982, he summarily dropped Keegan from the squad – much to his disappointment. Keegan found out from the papers. “I felt I deserved a phone call,” he said. “It would have cost Bobby Robson ten pee to phone me up at Newcastle.” Then a lovely, funny line from Quinn: “Strange that even a phone call is costed in Keegan’s universe.”

Subscribe to The Times

We sat beside the counter of the galley kitchen at the very top of Admiralty House. He made the tea, but, mindful of the controversy and offence he caused the other day, paused and forced himself to pour the water before the milk.

The stools were fashioned from broken old LPs: mine was an Acker Bilk album, his a compilation of songs by the Band of the Royal Yeomanry. They weren’t his – they were there already. He joked that they must have belonged to Anneliese Midgley.

Almost all of our conversation is reproduced across the front page and a full spread of this morning’s paper, which you should subscribe to read in full. It was my second extended conversation with him in a little over seven weeks and what struck me most about this one is how little his critique of politics has changed from the one he advanced in the beer garden at Stubshaw Cross. I won’t attempt to reproduce it here, but here’s a brief summary of what I learned.

1. It’s all about the cost of living. Burnham told me he has devised a “ten-year plan” to rewire the British economy but was candid on the political limits of such grand designs. He admitted that people won’t feel the benefits of public control and state intervention overnight, for most of it won’t and can’t happen overnight. Digital ID got whacked because he wants to “repriotrise” resources towards “the real show in town, which is the pressure people feel around their finances”. I thought there were shades of Nye Bevan in that phrasing – because, after all, the language of priorities is the religion of socialism, business-friendly or otherwise.

2. He spent this weekend in the Treasury. He was full of prase for Antonia Romeo, the cabinet secretary, and the access talks she’s run as cabinet secretary. It sounds like he wants to move to put money in people’s pockets this week. “I think we’ve got to a really good place. Everyone’s aligned. I’ve just been at the Treasury this morning, dealing with some of the announcements we’re making next week, and there’s no sort of tension in the system.”

3. Manchesterism can work for the bond markets. To spend an extended period of time with Burnham is to be reminded just how frustrating he finds Westminster discourse, not least on his economic agenda. He argued at length, indirectly, that his policy of public control of the essentials and commanding heights is actually one of fiscal restraint – “not just control of the cost of utilities to people, but also control of public spending”. He said: “There’s a critique here that is a more sophisticated critique than some people think. I think you have to rethink how we run things to get a different approach to public spending, and to running the economy — more focused on early investment, early intervention, setting people up for success, and much less paying for failure.”

4. His constituents think taxes are too high for low earners. And he clearly sympathises. I think this quote speaks for itself: “One thing I heard most on the doorsteps in Makerfield was frustration about the personal allowance, frozen at £12,570.” Those complaints are “lodged in his mind”, he said. Though he stopped short of promising an immediate assault on his particularly front, he is clearly aware of every longstanding criticism of the relationship between taxes on income and the strength of incentives to work.

5. He’s willing to praise Kemi and Nigel. To do anything else, he said, would be “a pointless sort of thing”. He thinks voters are bored – indeed, repulsed – by that familiar, knee-jerk, disingenuous criticism that’s motivated solely by partisanship and oblivious to objective reality. So he said of Badenoch: “I think Kemi is probably much more capable than some of her predecessors. She’s certainly impressive in some ways.” On the Reform leader, he said: “You’ve got to admire Farage’s communication skills.” I asked if he’d have them for a pint at the famous Stubshaw Cross club, and the answer wasn’t a no.

6. He’s keeping his seat at the Hill Dickinson. Listening to Burnham talk about the “shock” of the transition reminded me of this verse from A Shropshire Lad: “That is the land of lost content/I see it shining plain/The happy highways where I went/And cannot come again.” He’s not been for a run by himself for four weeks, will never drive his own car again, and managed to become the main event at his own daughter’s graduation at Cardiff last Wednesday. But the cops have agreed to let him sit in his own seat in the stands at Everton next month. It’ll make for a “mega focus group” on his premiership, he said.

7. He thinks Westminster has changed for the worse. The largely innacurate briefing and backbiting over his cabinet appointments came as “a bit of a shock”, he said. When he left, he thought the Commons had a largely “collectivist” and “stable” culture. Now all anyone does is feed the algorithm. Hence why he kept the “black box” of his thinking firmly shut until this morning. He didn’t want to feed the beast and make himself a prisoner of that “feverish” atmosphere, nor “cut across” Keir Starmer’s last weeks in office.

8. His dad doesn’t know he’ll be prime minister. Burnham loves his parents very much. Like Starmer, his relationship with his father – a man of the Labour left – was clearly formative. But the Burnham home in Culcheth was a happy one and he told me his first speech tomorrow will be discoloured by a little sadness, because Roy, his dad, has Alzheimer’s and does not know he is leader of the Labour Party. Anyone whose relatives have suffered from dementia will recognise this, and it’s for that reason I think he was more stoical than sad when we spoke about this. “It’s a family achievement,” Andy said. “Although he doesn’t know it, it still makes me feel that we’ve kind of done something together.”

9. Andy Burnham is a Catholic. He had to tell officials that he still professes the old faith, who’ve drawn up constitutional workarounds on Anglican bishops and the like. Though he’s no longer a regular at mass, there was no way he’d have answered that question in the negative. “My mother would never forgive me if I answered no to that question,” he said. Eileen Burnham will be “wearing out her rosary beads” this morning. Guy Garvey of Elbow texted Andy to say his mum would be the same. I wrote about how much this means to him last month.

10. He wanted to know if Tommy Fleetwood could win the Open. Didn’t we all. It’s a wool thing. I was at Royal Birkdale on Saturday and told Burnham, with some regret, that Tommy hadn’t had a great back nine that afternoon. “He’s a classic Evertonian,” Burnham said. As a Kopite, I think it’s best that I allow that observation to speak for itself.

Anyway, you should read all 2,500 words of the interview in The Times, where there’s much, much more. What most struck me is how utterly relaxed he seemed for a man – and I said this to him – who will be signing the letters of last resort this morning. He’ll certainly need a pint by the end of this week, and he’s determined to keep up the habits that keep him grounded. The only question is where he’ll be able to have one. And that question was one he – probably wisely – avoided answering.

To that end I interviewed his old mentor and firm friend, David Blunkett, for tomorrow’s Times. James Purnell has described Burnham as a “Blunkettite”, but the man himself modestly demurs. You’ll be able to find that piece here from Friday afternoon – if you haven’t already, subscribe to read it.

Subscribe to The Times

Our conversation in a muggy Lords committee room inevitably turned to immigration. Blunkett drew a very pointed contrast between the politics at play in London and the rest of England. He’s not the only influential Burnham supporter to see things in those terms, and that’s what exactly my column in today’s Times is about.

The core of Burnham’s critique of Labour’s mistakes in government is cultural. As he told me in Ashton a couple of months ago. We were watching the Challenge Cup final and comparing the relative vitality – and popularity – of the Labour Party and rugby league in the seat he’d win a couple of weeks later. “You have to stay connected, or you die,” he said. “The difference between the Labour Party and rugby league is that, although rugby league has its challenges, it’s run by the northern set – and the same can’t be said about the Labour Party.”

Well, the northern set are running the politics of this thing now. And they would say Ed Miliband isn’t becoming chancellor in part because of the cultural divergence Blunkett identified. Initially, the Burnham project looked like it was premised on an alliance between the old industrial left and the new left – or, to put it in modern Westminsterese, Blue Labour and the soft left. The latter is not quite how everyone would see it, but some of those involved in this increasingly unhappy dance certainly do.

Here’s how I explain the view from inside the tent. Or at least one of the tents.

Opponents of a Miliband chancellorship are saying, bluntly, that his political mission and ideological preoccupations are too far removed from the reality of life as lived outside of London.

One often hears this sort of argument and not just about Miliband: that the London left offer policy prescriptions that make little political sense for the small towns of provincial Britain. It’s all about renters in flatshares, they complain, or people who commute to work by train. Net zero, liberalism on immigration, et cetera, et cetera. To all of that, influential members of Labour’s northern set would say: basically nobody cares. “The music that you constantly play,” as the old Smiths record goes, “says nothing to me about my life.”

To quote another, later Morrissey lyric, the contention is that London is “home of the brash, outrageous and free” strain of Labour thinking.

And, yes, I know, this critique levels every possible subtlety and nuance and all the variety of life in a northern town – but it’s the one being made. Indeed, it’s the one that looks to have won the day.

Those who look set to lose out next week are, naturally, very unhappy, as Steve Swinford and my Times colleagues report on our front page this morning. The top line:

Andy Burnham is facing a revolt from his core support on the Labour left over his plans to appoint Shabana Mahmood over Ed Miliband as chancellor amid claims that she lacks an economic vision and is too divisive for the role.

One mournful gag doing the rounds among spads this week was that a government that looks north with Mahmood as chancellor risks doing “McSweeneyism in an Everton top” with the same underwhelming electoral results.

The use of “London” as a pejorative shorthand is also winding people up. It’s worth pointing out, in the interests of fairness if nothing else, that Burnham himself hasn’t really gone in for this. In his first speech as prime minister presumptive he went out of his way to frame his devolution agenda as a remedy for the capital’s “overheated” housing market as well as an overdue correction to regional inequality.

And this morning he’ll sell himself as a Labour leader “for the north and the south, for Scotland, for Wales and Northern Ireland, and for every town and every city in every nation and region of this great country”. But, as I wrote here last week, MPs in London and the southeast are already nervy. A cabinet appointed along the lines Burnham has written into his speech might soothe them a little. Let’s see.

I wonder, though, if this week we hurtled back into a world where ideological debates are the ones that really disrupt the work of Labour government. Some people who started this week thinking they were integral to the Burnham project now believe it has changed shape under false pretences – that words like “culture” are the invisibility cloak swaddling sometime allies who are creeping away from left-wing economics, away from the broad left, and towards what some are calling a possibly unsustainable and probably immoral three-way marriage of old right, Blairite right, and old industrial left.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the last of those groups is finding common cause with critics of the new left on the Labour right. Take a look at this excerpt from LEFT OUT, the book Gabriel Pogrund and I wrote on the fall of Jeremy Corbyn, about the sensationally popular 2019 petition to revoke Article 50 and cancel Brexit without another public vote, and how that was viewed by the most important union men in the Corbyn camp.

In Shadow Cabinet discussions over Brexit, Diane Abbott, Emily Thornberry and Keir Starmer also raised the number of signatures in their own North London seats. Others around the table believed their political horizons, already narrow, had been constrained by Brexit to the point of self-parody. Andrew Murray liked to remind attendees of the Brexit subcommittee that it would take him less than an hour to walk through Corbyn’s, Abbott’s, Thornberry’s and Starmer’s constituencies from his office in Unite HQ. Lavery, meanwhile, had his own axe to grind. ‘Look how many signatures there are in my seat!’ he moaned. The answer, as in so many other Labour redoubts in the north and Midlands, was not very many. At its peak, the number of signatures in Corbyn’s seat was 27,000. In Lavery’s backyard [Ashington, Northumberland], a mere 4,300.

That London again. Back in the present, the quote about McSweeneyism is telling. The widespread hope was that this government would speak to what Starmer aides once called the “hero voters” of the north and midlands as well as the urban precariat in one voice, rather than picking and choosing and delineating on values. As this was all unfolding on Thursday night – or, rather, as the dust was settling – I bumped into someone very close to Nigel Farage. They were delighted by the likely result of the race for the Treasury. In their view this appointment guarantees that Labour’s coalition will remain fragmented, and all the better for Reform UK.

So why is it happening? Really it reveals quite a dramatic disparity in how these different bits of the Labour Party think about class. Members of the embattled group the northern set call the London left argue – accurately, in a Marxist sense – that it’s all about economics and this culture stuff is the really corrosive identity politics.

Then there are those who argue that the intersection of economics with identity and culture is what most people really understand by class these days. They now appear to be winning. The other side think the culture argument is disingenuous.

There’s quite a tart irony in all of this, anyway. Who was it that reintroduced words like class back into Labour’s lexicon in 2010? That was a forbidden word under Tony Blair, of course. In 1999, he said: “The class war is over.” Ed Miliband, now on the wrong side of it, got Labour talking about it in those unselfconscious terms again. I And what thanks he’s getting for it now.

Now listen

We recorded two episodes of our State of It podcast this week, both on this same subject. When we did the first, on Tuesday, we were still only the foothills of this brave new world.

On Thursday we did a turn before an audience of colleagues at Times HQ and set out, among other things, why Team Burnham have alighted on Mahmood – despite her lack of Treasury experience.

Subscribe to The State of It

Labour Friends of Larkin

I opened that column with an excerpt from Jill, Philip Larkin’s debut novel. He grew to really hate it as he aged, and you can understand why: it’s about a boy who comes to Oxford from the provinces, feels endlessly belittled by his new posho mates but nonetheless can’t help wanting to be them, and falls haplessly and hopelessly in love with an uninterested and unavailable schoolgirl. In later life Larkin thought it painfully juvenile but it’s nonetheless revealing of his undergraduate worldview. After all, it’s fairly obvious who inspired the protagonist.

Burnham loves Larkin, of course. I don’t know whether he’s read Jill – you have to really try to get through the two novels, as I did with this one years and years ago – but the scene in which Lancashire lad John Kemp finds his newly blitzed hometown of Huddlesford mocked by a gaggle of public schoolboys as a “music hall fiction” where nobody could possibly live struck me as a nice distillation of his perspective on north and south.

Speaking of Burnham’s own time at Oxbridge – Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, to be precise – Dan Boffey’s account of the first 45 years of his life in The Guardian is just superb. It’s long, but you’ll end up returning to it more than once – probably the best thing I’ve read on Burnham yet. It notes Burnham’s confession that he suffered “impostor syndrome” at university. But the one thing he took with him once he returned jobless to Culcheth was that love of Larkin. The year he graduated he wrote this letter to The Guardian, which is surely the purest essence of his personality.

Who else would compare Larkin to the Crazy Gang of Plough Lane? There’s one description of what’s happened over the chancellor appointment, by the way – via John Motson. And there it is, the Crazy Gang has beaten the Culture Club!

Other people occasionally wrote poetry into speeches for Starmer – Larkin when the Queen died, Auden at conference in 2021. You never really got the sense they were his choices. Burnham writes his himself – at least for now – so we can surely expect some Larkin or Tony Harrison between now and the next election.

What to read on Widdecombe

I loved this essay on Ann Widdecombe and her understudied legacy by Matthew D’Ancona. It’s shot through with humility, which – I say with what I hope is an ample degree of self-awareness – is all too rare in political commentary.

Those of us that came of age long after she left not only government but the shadow cabinet probably struggled to conceive of Widdecombe as a politician as opposed to a celebrity or opinionated star of light entertainment.

I’m very glad to have read this – and much else of the contemporaenous reporting it made me seek out – because otherwise I would have gone on remembering Widdecombe as a Great British Eccentric. She was more central to Reform than I appreciated too, which I should have realised when I was told more than once by one of Farage’s inner circle of her sceptcial reaction to his pledge to renationalise the steel industry last year.

The most time I’d spent with her before this week was over several viewings of Louis Theroux’s 2002 fly-on-the-wall – filmed during the Tory leadership contest of the previous year. Watch that just the once and, like me, you’ll have committed this verse of Widdecombe’s poetry to heart.

Goodness gracious, what is that?
It’s Mr Pugwash, my black cat.
Goodness gracious, are there others?
Yes indeed, my cat Carruthers.

Anyway, this from D’Ancona seems the crucial point: “She had foreseen the future, a future that people like me on the centre right had not come close to spotting.” You get the sense from both this piece and the Theroux film that she could and would have been the Tory Corbyn had the party’s leadership rules not locked her out of contention in 2001, as explained here.

The point is: Widdecombe had foreseen all this. As Portillo and Maude pursued fiscal prudence, she had warned that the Tories must promise to match Labour spending on health and education in the 2001 election, and steer clear of the weeds of economic jargon. “I will tell you this, Francis [Maude],” she said, “down at the Pig and Whistle they do not talk about aggregate expenditure levels.”

Five years before Nigel Farage became UKIP leader, she was already designing the political software that he and his followers would use to win the referendum and to mount their high-octane campaign for power after the 2024 general election.

On the run-down Arden estate in Hackney in June 2001, as she announced her withdrawal from the Tory leadership contest, she had explicitly identified the new electoral demographic that would eventually dominate political discourse, calling them “the Forgotten Decent.”

As she put it: “They are people like us but with only a fraction of our resources and all they want to do is live normally but instead their lives are made a daily hell by drugs, thuggery, intimidation and degradation of the environment.”

Then again, even her reinvention as a celebrity was a political act.

She understood, too, that the partition between politics and entertainment was collapsing. Plenty of people in Westminster sneered when she took part in the first season of ITV’s Celebrity Fit Club in 2002 – that’s 21 years before Farage turned I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, in which he finished third, into a relaunch of his political ambitions.

The sneering continued when she appeared on Strictly Come Dancing and, with Anton Du Beke as her partner, in 2010, lasting until the tenth week; but, as she said to me on more than one occasion, “if certain people sneer at you, you know you’re winning.” In 2018, she finished second on Celebrity Big Brother.

This, too, seems bang on. Just look at what Kemi Badenoch has been saying this week about the ECHR and net zero.

The modernising position that I once espoused simply doesn’t exist any more. In the battle for the soul of the right, she lost the battle but definitely won the war…

…the populist politics of which Ann Widdecombe was a principal architect has been nourished by performative wokery and seen off both the centre right and technocratic Labour. Burnham is, to borrow Lincoln’s words, the last best hope.

I said to a couple of Labour people this week that “the forgotten decent” is a lovely, prescient bit of phrasemaking. It’s telling, I think, that even David Cameron used it in a 2007 Guardian piece.

These are the people Ann Widdecombe once memorably called "the forgotten decent" - trapped in deprivation through no immediate fault of their own, unable to climb into the middle classes because of a series of barriers that completely block the route.

Doesn’t that sum everything up? A modernising Tory leader quoting Ann Widdecombe, seemingly safe in the knowledge she’d been defeated forever, in The Guardian. I wonder what today’s equivalent of that would be.

Watch this

The algorithm served me this clip of Jude Bellingham’s grandad knocking his specialist subject – the history of Nigeria from 1900 to 1966 – straight out of the park on a 1987 episode of Mastermind. This wasn’t even 40 years ago yet everything about it seems almost Victorian. A bloke calling themselves a “schoolmaster”? Studying the history of Nigeria as a hobby? We won’t see his like again, and more’s the pity. James Marriott could do worse than run this video as an advert for his book on the post-literate society.

Worth clicking

• Gawain Towler on the kindness of Ann Widdecombe

• William Davies on the real meaning of Andy Burnham’s anti-politics

• Michael Gove makes the case against blanket security for MPs

• George Osborne and Ed Balls on the same subject – and the case for Miliband

• Geri Scott, Matt Dathan and Constance Kampfner on what to expect from Shabana Mahmood in the Treasury

• A great Times obit of the guy that revived Consett with Phileas Fogg crisps

I’ll be back here with more on Blunkett, Burnham and Labour’s new era early next week. Thanks for reading.

Anyway, my column in this morning’s Times isn’t about Nigel Farage, of whom more shortly, but Andy Burnham. Nominated for the Labour leadership by 322 Labour MPs as of last night – 80 per cent of them! – we now know he will be prime minister and so the frantic and tenuous conjecture about what he might think will now kick up a gear over the ten days that separate us from the first England appearance in World Cup final in 60 years and our first wool prime minister ever. So I’ve written about what he does think.

Subscribe to The Times

As I say in the column, one of the most damning things I was ever told about Sir Keir Starmer was this – from an interview with one of his closest, indeed most admiring, advisers for the paperback edition of GET IN.

I don’t think he has a theory of power. I don’t think he’s ever sat down and read any history, or has any idea of how power works. I just don’t think he would be attracted to the kind of historical figures who got stuff done.

Burnham definitely does. Understanding it demands we once again travel at warp speed down the East Lancs Road and back into the Liverpool of the 1980s. In my Substack on his Catholicism, I noted that Burnham grew up in and around a Liverpool shaped by the subversive politics of two Dereks: Worlock, the archbishop, and Hatton, the Militant deputy leader of the city council. And he has actually spoken before of his fleeting, boyish admiration for the latter, too.

In March 2010 he made this confession to The Independent.

This might be career-limiting to say but, as a young teenager, I was very taken in by Derek Hatton who in the early 80s seemed to be on the north-west news every night taking on Maggie.

He went on to clarify that he “grew out” of this phase once he discovered Neil Kinnock. It’s worth lingering on, though, as it provides us with yet more formative context for the politics that now mean everything to Britain.

Burnham came to political sentience at a time when Margaret Thatcher was imposing hard and unyielding limits on the powers of English local government – how much money they could raise, how much of it they could spend, abolishing metropolitan county councils like Merseyside’s.

This drive for centralisation was as essential to her premiership as deregulation and privatisation, and when Burnham speaks of rolling back her legacy and with it 40 years of neoliberalism, he is speaking about this too. It was all linked, as – clearly – are the consequences and the prescription they demand in Burnham’s mind. There was a hint of this in his maiden speech as the member for Leigh in 2001, too.

People in the Leigh area can be forgiven for having little confidence in this place. Until recently, it has delivered only bad news. Dr. Beeching put Leigh on the map —sadly, for making it the largest town in England without a railway station. Next came the closure of the mills and mines in the 1980s and 1990s, tearing the heart out of the communities based around them, and Leigh infirmary’s accident and emergency unit was closed in the 1990s. The challenge I face is to restore people’s faith in politics and show that Parliament does listen and deliver good news as well as bad.

Same as it ever was. Plus ça change. Etc. So the Burnham diagnosis, then as now, is that political and economic power are, by design, draining away from ordinary people in ordinary places and ever more powerless politicians are increasingly distrusted as a result. To this we can add his critique of whipping, on which he expounded at length – with lavish promises of change – in a very long email to Labour MPs on Wednesday. (Click here to read it in full.)

The sum of it all is this. Councils are toothless and broke. Their essential services are outsourced or cut into uselessness. They just end up frustrating the public as a result: everything’s crap and they’ve no means to make it better. The people they’d think to ask no longer have a stake or say either: in Ashton the other week, Burnham offered the example of Rochdale Boroughwide Housing, which kicked councillors off its board as soon as it was able to and then had a two-year-old, Awaab Ishak, die in a mould-infested flat on its watch. That’s why he speaks specifically of building new council housing, not social housing.

He also spoke about multi-academy trusts. Bridget Phillipson has already copped a lot of flak for trying to curb their power to set salaries, hire who they like, and pay their headteachers and executives unfathomable riches. Another example, there, of actually existing Burnhamism.

So it goes on. The Commons can’t do as much as voters assume it can because so many of its functions are outsourced too: to quangos, arm’s-length bodies, whatever. Their MP, fearful of the coercive power of this whip or that spad or someone else in No 10, might not even want to speak out anyway. If they did kick off, they’d probably end up even less likely to deliver the change their constituents wanted. Elections start to feel like a sham: what’s the point? Somebody do something!

That’s how you end up with Reform sweeping almost all before them in Wigan and St Helens barely six weeks before Burnham wins Makerfield. He’d say this was an understandable but regrettable voter reaction to the “unaccountable state”. When he said that to me, it reminded me of the title of the Hillsborough Independent Panel report he commissioned as culture secretary: The Patronising Disposition of Unaccountable Power. Because that’s the other thing. If you’re complaining about any of this, chances are you’ll just be told that you just don’t get it.

Accountability is hard, of course. People mess up, not least the PLP. Some councils aren’t up to the job of proper democratic oversight – though we might ask why that is. Several senior Labour people whose judgement I trust told me flatly his Outlook manifesto for party unity and culture change – “Let’s all be friends” was how Morgan McSweeney snarkily described Starmer’s short-lived impulses in the same direction – was undeliverable nonsense.

And sure, much of it may end up as a manifesto for merely pretending very convincingly and charmingly to listen to Labour MPs. As I was speaking to Burnham allies and critics about this on Wednesday I dredged up a column I wrote just after the Gaza rebllion kicked off in October 2023.

Lesson one: individual MPs matter. Even, as John Major put it, the dispossessed, never-possessed and the bastards. Every successful leader is at one time or another accused of high-handed autocracy. Backbenchers don’t like it when they are ignored. In the main the sensibilities of Labour MPs are conventional and conservative but when it comes to party management their preferred model would probably be the editorial collective of Spare Rib. But that is not licence to neglect them, and they are feeling neglected… in government they will want and need to feel like more than lobby fodder.

Subscribe to read in full

It was obvious even then that this was a big vulnerability. It wasn’t addressed until much too late. Challenging though it will be to offer in some cases, even a cursory acknowledgement of MPs’ humanity from Team Burnham would be a marked improvement on what they initially got in the early months of this government.

So yeah. It might fail. But he believes in breaking open that “unaccountable state”. Always has, and the same is true of so much of what we’re now listening to intently for the first time. The problem, as that Labour peer I mentioned in last week’s Friday Notebook said to me, is that believing is not quite the same thing as thinking.

A few things for Burnham to think – and worry – about

1. This letter, signed by more than 80 Labour MPs, demanding he reverse Shabana Mahmood’s controversial proposals on indefinite leave to remain. The language is robust and the subtext clear. One minister texted this response to my tweet: “How can any of the 80 serve in a government with Shabana?”

2. John Bew’s warning that he could face an international military crisis within weeks of taking power.

3. Just how quickly Starmer loyalists leapt at the opportunity to brief indignantly about Lou Haigh’s unsurprising admission to the BBC that she and Burnham had been thinking about a leadership transition for at least a year.

4. Accusations that ministers have artificially manipulated hospital waiting lists to meet their target of treating 65 per cent of patients within 18 weeks.

5. Sharon Graham breaking the habit of her lifetime at the helm of Unite and nominating a candidate in an interal election. It’s like Dylan going electric. Good news: it’s a nomination for Andy Burnham. 11 years late, but still, that one’ll taste sweet. Bad news: it comes with a long list of conditions, some of which he could struggle to meet.

But maybe none of it matters so much, given what’s happening elsewhere…

Safe refuse for Nigel?

My Times piece on Farage from earlier this week seems to put me in a fairly small minority of commentators who think a by-election in Clacton needn’t necessarily spell inevitable and crushing embarrassment for Reform UK. And, judging by your comments on the Substack I wrote subsequently, my strong aversion to Count Binface also turns out to be a rare allergy. But then again, I think Ken Dodd is funny, so I accept I’m not making an objective judgement.

That said, I was quite taken with Fraser Nelson’s Joe Dolce theory of politics: could Binface be to Farage what Shaddap You Face was to Ultravox’s Vienna?

It was heroically kept off [number one] by a popular support for Joe Dolce’s Shaddap You Face: vulgar, daft, irresistible and magnificently unserious. All very British. I’ve always see that Dolce moment as one that defines a unique part of our national character.

See also: Rage Against the Machine versus X Factor winner Joe McElderry in 2009. Anyway, after several days of listening to Binface and people talking about Binface – all of them profoundly painful – I still haven’t changed my mind. On balance I still just about think it’s Reform’s critics and particularly the Tories who stand to lose most from, as Rachel Reeves put it on Wednesday, Farage spending his summer “arguing with a bin”.

The best explanation I can give as to why I think this actually came from Justine Greening – remember her? – on LBC earlier this week. She said:

How depressing for democracy that we’re going to end up with an important by-election and the only choices are apparently going to be Nigel Farage and Count Binface. And I’m making a serious point here. There’s no point criticising Nigel Farage, as you both have done, and then not putting anyone up against him when it’s a genuine elections with real voters.

Zoe Williams from The Guardian then asked Greening what possible democratic purpose it could be serving. To which she said this.

It’s electing an MP... It’s real people, with real concerns, real votes, electing a real MP, and it’s pointless sitting in this lovely London radio studio chatting about it, and then when the actual political fight happens in Clacton, oh, we’re like, oh no, I don’t think we should really participate, it’s just a stunt. No it’s not, it’s called a by-election.

I agree. The video of this exchange is worth watching back in full. Make that woman work and pensions secretary again! Whatever you think about the motives at play, this is still a real election. I think there’s an arguable, strong but not unanswerable case that Kemi Badenoch ought to have run a candidate and taken the opportunity provided by weeks of free airtime to make the same attacks on Farage, his record and his party’s money she’s making anyway.

It’s unlikely they would have won but even slashing Reform’s share of the vote would have been hailed as a moral victory and further evidence of the national comeback so much of Westminster is trying, on patchy and inconsistent evidence, to will into existence. Arguing with a bin is one thing, ha ha ha. But am I really alone in thinking a substantive political argument would better serve the interests of the old guard, and particularly a Conservative Party that could do with more proof points for Reform’s decline?

You can understand why Badenoch didn’t rise to the bait, though. As a wise Labour official said to me on Thursday morning: “It’s not winnable for them so they shouldn’t provide a chance to prove that, but that should set more alarm bells ringing for them/the media than it seems to be.” In any case, new Sunday Times revelations about a police investigation into Reform donations suggest Badenoch will have ample opportunity to rehearse those talking points yet.

Read, digest and regurgitate

Joey D'Urso

Every World Cup quarter-final has a political link!

Read more

2 months ago · 22 likes · 1 comment · Joey D'Urso

Joey D’Urso’s excellent Substack on the politics of football has pre-empted a lot of the questions I’ve found myself asking myself and others as I watch this World Cup tie or that. The above piece is a great thing to have up your sleeve in the pub or group chat over the coming days. Echo and the Bunnymen gave their first compilation of singles the hilariously grandiose title of Songs to Learn and Sing. These posts are ones to learn and pass off as your own insight.

Another recent one, on whether a majority Protestant country can win the tournament for the first time, is worth reading too. Did Brazil crash out to Norway because they’ve lost their Catholic flair in a new era of polairising Protestant evangelicalism? I’ve seen loads of people ask that question with varying degrees of seriousness on Twitter, but Joey’s is the only detailed answer I’ve read. Good fun.

Now listen

I was on the LRB podcast with James Butler and William Davies last week, discussing Burnham’s political economy and style.

Meanwhile I have a Labour Catholic to thank – or blame – for what follows. They complained that nitpicking traditionalists questioning Burnham’s claim to the faith were “modern-day Pharisees”. Which inevitably reminded me of Lord of the Dance.

Before I knew it I had this version by the Houghton Weavers on repeat and I can’t seem to make it stop. That’s the Ken Dodd cortex doing its thing again, presumably.

The late Andy Kershaw, always impossible to please, once said these guys didn’t count as proper folk musicians. Whatever they were, it’s a shame that unlike George Formby, say, or Doddy, they’ve all but disappeared from popular imagination in the north-west. Book the survivors for the Burnham Inauguration Ball.

Notwithstanding all of that, though, I still think this gambit is worth interrogating on its own terms. That’s what I did on our State of It podcast yesterday and I have a piece in this morning’s Times to that effect too. You should subscribe to read the latter in full, but what follows is a brief summary of what I think about Reform think. As I write this just before midnight on Tuesday 7th July, the overwhelming and near-unanimous reaction to Farage’s resignation is one of undisguised relish. No other party has taken his bait – not even the Greens – and the Westminster commentariat has by and large joined this popular front too.

Subscribe to The Times

I don’t describe this consensus as a precursor to defining myself against it, but I do nonetheless think it is illustrative of a habit that vindicates rather than undermines Reform’s analysis of the political mainstream. Tonight we have ended up where, frankly, polite opinion always wanted to be. Farage is a “grifter” – one of those wierd online words that has lodged itself unbidden in the vernacular of political professionals – and, more to the point, a loser and a joke who must only be described and analysed as such.

As I write in The Times today, the mass of questions, accusations and uncontested facts that led us to this juncture will not disappear when the writ is moved or when the seemingly inevitable result is declared. But whatever else you want to believe Farage is – whatever else he may or may not be proven to be – he is also a politician with political objectives. He leads what is now a fully functioning, national, mass-membership political party – something Ukip never was – with its own objectives too. So what are they?

Tuesday’s commentary reminded me of the opening to the excellent Ken Burns documentary on Huey Long – the Lousiana populist of whom I’ve written here before. That film, one of Burns’ first, opens with an epigraph from Robert Penn Warren, who described Long’s governorship as an example of the “drama of ethics and power”. There then follows a series of short interviews with Louisiana voters who lived through the heyday of the Kingfish.

Three old boys from poor parishes say he was great without reservation, and then a posh New Orleans matron breezily admits that her social circle would fantasise about his assassination without fail whenever they met of a Saturday evening. “It didn’t mean you meant to do it,” she says. “It just meant that you wished there was some way to rid the state of this incubus.” Long would have liked that, and taken it as a proof point for his entire worldview. Farage will take the same view of everything that’s been said today.

What Reform are very consciously trying to do – as Long did, with his self-published newspapers and marathon radio broadcasts – is break out of the existing political culture and fashion their own. We saw this in Makerfield, a by-election whose result obscured – or maybe demeaned – the experimentalism of the campaign. Farage’s team defied influential insiders to stand Robert Kenyon as Reform’s candidate and ran an almost entirely digital campaign. Kenyon’s launch video was viewed some 20 million times. Some of Reform’s meatiest fiscal policies yet – on tax breaks for tradesmen and the self-employed, as well as on overtime – were launched on social media, rather than at press conferences for lobby journalists.

And at the end of it they lost – by some margin, too – but they still increased their share of the vote on 2024. Since then, as I write at greater length in The Times, they have devised a list of target seats and a field strategy inspired – they say – by that employed by Morgan McSweeney and Hollie Ridley’s winning Labour campaign at the last general election. Know the seats you can win if you want a majority, divert resources from those you can’t – or rather the seats you probably won’t win, or don’t strictly need to win.

They are now spending a lot of money and hiring a lot of people in pursuit of said strategy. Already they had taken a conscious decision to do so while paying less deference to establishment manners, and spending less time chasing sympathetic coverage from the Westminster media.

The latter is an even harder ask now. But really it is not even yesterday’s question. Indeed, consider yesterday: Reform streamed the speech from their own studio, pushed out the text on Farage’s Substack. The alacrity with which Reform’s leadership abandoned its hostility to Tory defectors in the first quarter of this year is now, in hindsight, seen at the top of the party as a cautionary tale of what happens when Farage is conscripted into a Westminster game he never really wanted to play anyway.

It will suit Andy Burnham and indeed everyone else to treat Clacton as one long non-event – as Reform talking to itself while a man with a bin on his head makes him look silly. What it also is, though, is the first life cycle of a new political ecosystem in which it pursues a strategy of pure populism entirely on its own terms. Sure, we could one day look back on this as the beginning of the end. The core vote to which he is now speaking directly may yet shrink under this new glare of unhelpful scrutiny. But as far as Farage is concerned, all the right people are laughing – and creating the space for a new school of politics.

• Will the Conservatives and Labour field candidates in the Clacton by-election?

• Will a Reform UK victory in Clacton boost Nigel Farage's standing in the rest of the country?

• And can Nigel Farage be suspended after a parliamentary standards investigation even if he wins the by-election?

Who is George Cottrell, aka Posh George? Listen to the series here podfollow.com/posh-george

Steven Swinford, political editor, The Times

Lara Spirit, deputy political editor, The Sunday Times

Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator, The Times

Producers: Euan Dawtrey, Harry Kitson

Executive producer: Molly Guinness

Picture: Getty Images

Audio: Reuters

Email us: thestateofit@thetimes.co.uk

This podcast was brought to you thanks to subscribers of The Times and The Sunday Times. To enjoy unlimited digital access to all our journalism subscribe here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So hold me accountable on this one. I’ve decided to send out a weekly newsletter at around this time every week. Most of what I’ve written here has been long and essayistic, adding context and commentary to my pieces in The Times. I’ll still be doing that as often as I feel like it, but much of what I read and write doesn’t really justify that treatment.

Here you can expect to find my Friday Times column, good – better? – work from colleagues, reflections on the week in Westminster, and whatever else I’d like to recommend that’s probably too eccentric for the day job. Anyway, let me know what you think of this experiment in the comments.

This week’s column

There may be trouble ahead for Andy Burnham, I write in my Times column today.

For now, everyone is at least pretending it’s going to be great. It’s as if the Labour Party is infected with Burnham Magnanimity Syndrome. “I feel optimistic about it,” Morgan McSweeney told Nick Robinson yesterday.

This is the same Morgan McSweeney who was described to me, the week after the local elections, as having “contempt for Andy” by someone who knows him very well. He is, however, a Labour tribalist – he even said U2’s With or Without You reminds him of his umbilicial relationship with the party – so let’s credit him with a degree of sincerity. In any case, the column isn’t about McSweeney, but the people he left behind.

In private it does not take long for conversations with recusant Starmerites to turn to the reasons why Burnham’s premiership won’t be great. The very existence of that former group of people, who feel angry and defrauded and humiliated and hopeless for the future, is one of them. They are straining to remain loyal, not least because they feel Burnham and his enablers in cabinet showed no loyalty to them. But they will need very little excuse to kick off.

It’s broader than that, though. As I write this morning – subscribe to The Times to read the full piece – there are geographic and demographic grievances too. MPs from London and the southeast don’t like the cut of Burnham’s gib. They think his rhetoric elides poverty and deprivation in the south a little too readily and glibly.

It’s notable that some are already saying this in public. Naushabah Khan (Gillingham and Rainham, majority 3,972) told ITV that Burnham risked “falling into stereotypes” yesterday. Then there’s the gender question. All this talk of a Demon Eyes first XI reunion around the cabinet table and/or Miliband reconciliation in the Great Offices of state is really winding some Labour women up.

This stuff feels a little inchoate right now but could yet explode if Burnham’s first appointments alienate the wrong people. His strongest critique of the Labour Party in the country and Westminster is cultural. One little misstep could see him cede quite a lot of that moral highground. Much more on this theme, including some exclusive polling of union members, in the column.

Subscribe to The Times

Was Wilson wrong about the Treasury?

Ed Balls disagrees with Tom Watson, and since I agreed quite violently with the latter in my last Substack on No 10 North, I suppose he disagrees with me too. He mentions both of our posts on Burnham’s big move to a Manchester retail park in the latest episode of Political Currency – for my money the best podcast apart from the ones I’m on.

Balls argues that Harold Wilson was wrong about the Treasury and the Department of Economic Affairs. He says an outcome in which the former was reduced to a mere finance department would be bad for everyone on Whitehall. Instead he makes the case that strong political leadership can reset Treasury orthodoxy in a chancellor’s image – think Lawson, Brown, Osborne – and allow a prime minister to wield that department’s immense power to almost any end they want.

It’s a thought-provoking point. We’ve come to speak of Treasury orthodoxy as if it were immutable and unchanging. This is surely in part, as George Osborne says a little later in the discussion, because the Treasury has had “a bad decade”. I don’t think many ministers who haven’t darkened its door would disagree.

Anyway, what I appreciate as well as Balls is that Labour history suggests circumventing or circumscribing Treasury power is harder than it looks. What’s different this time is the prime minister doing so in his own name.

Burnham’s broad church

The Times essay I wrote on Andy Burnham’s Catholicism the other week has been followed by a lot of sour old nonsense elsewhere. The last-but-one Spectator leader got the point: “Burnham is shaped by his lifelong faith: a Catholic communitarian, raised in the north-west, steeped in the teachings of Derek Worlock about solidarity with the disadvantaged and working–class dignity.” Others seem to be engaged in a miserable competition to miss it most spectacularly.

Subscribe to read the essay

In the Catholic Herald, the guy who runs the Latin Mass Society derides a vision of faith that “consists in having a pious Catholic grandmother and going to church on the occasional Christmas”. He asks whether Burnham or other self-identified “cultural Catholics” like him go on pilgrimages, pray before “devotional images in the home”, have said home blessed by a priest, or “put on a scapular or blessed medal when getting dressed”.

I don’t know the answer. I’ll try to find out. Maybe his mum does that stuff, or did – there’s a nice anecdote in my essay about the boy Burnham and his brother booting a football into her cherished porcelain nun – as essential a furnishing in an Irish Catholic home in 20th Century England as a lampshade. Premier Christianity, meanwhile, urges its readers “not to be distracted by empty Christian-sounding rhetoric”. Also in The Spectator, Melanie McDonagh draws an unfavourable comparison between Burnham’s Catholicism and the “living faith” of St Edmund Arrowsmith, the Haydock martyr who gave his name to the school in Ashton attended by its new MP’s kids.

It’s not for me to quibble with any of this, just as it isn’t really anyone’s place to say Burnham isn’t a real Catholic. But in the fortnight since my piece went up I have had more conversations on this theme than I can count, most of them with Labour people who identify as he does. One MP told me of attending their aunt’s requiem mass in the church beside Burnham’s campaign headquarters, and finding themselves momentarily winded by the echoes of old grief when they returned. Another said they were not religious but, like Burnham, felt the core ethics of the faith into which they were born were the very bedrock of their politics. If they identified as anything, this MP added, it was as “an ethnic Catholic”.

I was quite taken with that last phrase – Catholicism not as a set of hard and fast rules, as espoused quite angrily by some of Burnham’s critics, but an inherited, indelible identity, rooted forever in time and place. Hilary Mantel’s 1989 novel Fludd, set in the fictional mill town of Fetherhoughton, is worth reading for an immersion course in this world and cultural milieu. It’s also striking just how long this affinity has stuck in a country whose working-class Catholics were in so many cases betrayed by the Church they had no choice to belong to. What is that enduring allegiance evidence of, if not a living faith? Surely the alternative, if there’s no place for a Burnham at communion, is a dying one.

I’d say this cover from The Tablet, so often brave and far-sighted on this kind of thing, struck the most resonant chord with the lapsed, imperfect Catholics I’ve spoken to. They see themselves and their values in Burnham. It’s just what they are, and always will be. Unsurprisingly, that magazine’s former editor Catherine Pepinster has written far more illuminatingly on Burnham and the Church than anyone else I’ve mentioned – this time in the i. She makes the astute point that subsidarity – “encouraging decision-making at local levels” – is at the heart of both Manchesterism and Catholic social teaching. And there’s some nice stuff about the late Labour MP Paul Goggins in there too.

Nick Spencer of Theos is also worth reading. He’s probably right to say in this Church Times piece that Burnham’s faith is “bang in the middle of the Overton Window”. I’m not sure I agree, though, with this: “We would be right to expect something from Mr Burnham’s deep but tame RC sympathies, but nothing radical.” I actually think they’re a large part of the reason he’s started to sound like one. As one Labour peer said to me on the Commons terrace the other night: “He believes.” Supplementary question: “But can he think?”

Since we’re talking about the northwest: I’m very much enjoying Lancashire: Exploring the Historic County that Made the Modern World by Chris Moss.

It’s a lovely book, which I’ve been reading in fits and starts for light relief since it was gifted to me six weeks ago. I’d usually agree with James Marriott’s unimpeachable judgement and say this is a terrible way to read non-fiction. But Moss is a travel writer – a Warringtonian who returned home in late middle age after a long, necessarily peripatetic career – and so this tour d’horizon goes place by place, reminiscence by reminiscence. As a reading experience it’s not unlike Bruce Chatwin’s What Am I Doing Here, only a little less flamboyant and far-flung.

As we prepare for the arrival of our first wool prime minister, the early chapters on the in-between towns of south Lancashire that shaped him reward close reading. Nigel Farage once wrote of his own boyhood on the edge of the South Downs: “I just wanted to feel the connection between me and the land, and the people who had come before me.” Moss reminds us that these places, their industries and thus their politics were made by that land: the Mersey, the coal, the salt.

The sense of loss of which those people often speak these days makes more sense once you understand just how pioneering their towns once were. The chapters on Warrington and St Helens are a long compendium of firsts. The former was the first paved town in England. That somewhat underwhelming distinction brought to mind a very funny line in John Campbell’s life of FE Smith, which undercuts his elaborate testament of childhood poverty by pointing out his parents owned one of the first two telephones in Birkenhead. Imagine those calls.

But back to Lancashire. The Sankey was the world’s first modern canal, and, like the locomotive traction pioneered at Rainhill, made loads of the other great industrial firsts – Warrington soap and wire, St Helens glass – possible. Moss is right, as much as the subtitle might read as parochial chest-thumping. This stuff – these places – really did make the modern world. But, as Keir Starmer said in a speech the other week, they don’t make soap in Warrington these days. They’re turning William Lever’s factory into something that might make the modern world anew.

Now, you may not know this, but for centuries, Warrington was at the forefront of Britain’s soap-making industry. And until a few years ago, a Unilever factory was its epicentre. Generations of local people worked there. Families built their lives around it. And for over 130 years, the smell of soap from that factory was a familiar part of daily life. But then it closed. And for many people in the town, that factory became a symbol of a community left behind. But today, I am pleased to tell you that story is changing, because that factory is being transformed into a new AI data centre.

Hmm. Not quite the same, really, is it? Much smaller headcount, for one. It was interesting to see Andy Burnham’s advisers kicking back against this thinking in the FT. They said: “Unfettered tech-boosterism is a vote-loser.” Then: “We do need data centres, but we need to think about who runs and owns those data centres… There has to be a framework for accountability and making sure that 100 per cent of data centres aren’t owned by foreign companies.” Of driverless taxis, they added: “What’s the point and who’s it for? What’s your plan for dealing with the constituency of people that will be impacted by their introduction, including black cab drivers and Uber drivers?”

All of this reminds me that I still haven’t finished Captain Swing, a now neglected but beautifully written work of English history by Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé. Swing was the pseudonym adopted by the authors of poison pen letters written by rioting agircultural labourers who smashed up threshing machines in the early 19th Century. Sample line: “They did not even sell their birthright for a mess of pottage. They simply lost it.”

God, nobody writes like that anymore. I picked this up in Hay-on-Wye a couple of months ago precisely because it made me think of the changes artificial intelligence is wreaking on the labour market, and how the forcibly unemployed might end up reacting. Only last week a union leader told me 1,500 of their members had lost their jobs to AI in a fortnight. Already you can see how this might become a generational dividing line in Labour politics.

Captain Swing – or at least the chunk of it I’ve read – will also make you think about welfare, which has a much longer history in Britain than Labour’s folk memory implies. Hobsbawm is especially interesting – and, if you read it today, bitterly resonant – on what the Poor Law did to the rural workforce, for so long a “a bold peasantry, a country’s pride”. Technological change and parish handouts made them “servile, broken spirited and severely straitened in their means of living”. One for me to finish and you to start in pursuit of a longer view on all of this.

Now listen

Alternatively, you can join me and Steve Swinford in the present. We recorded another episode of The State of It yesterday and did our best to convey the manic depression of a Labour Party in purgatory.

Apologies to the learned friend of mine who texted me the other day with an instruction to stop quoting Edmund Dell – “he was, in reality, quite a marginal figure”. In this one I quote a source citing Edmund Dell as evidence for why Burnham should retain more of Starmer’s cabinet than he might immediately be inclined to.

A couple of hours later, a minister texted to tell me they were reading Edmund Dell’s A Strange, Eventful History: Democratic Socialism in Britain. They were the second to send me a nice message about Edmund Dell this week. He’s not marginal anymore! I might have to rename this Substack for a second time. The Burnham Magnanimity Syndrome outbreak is over. Edmund Dell Syndrome is Westminster’s new public health crisis.

Steven Swinford, political editor, The Times

Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator, The Times

Producers: Euan Dawtrey, Harry Kitson

Executive producer: Molly Guinness

Picture: Getty Images

00:00 - Burnham's Intense One-on-One MP Meetings

00:32 - Paranoia and Panic in the Cabinet

01:44 - Will Burnham Appeal to Southern Voters?

02:50 - Desperate Ministers Begging to Keep Their Jobs

03:40 - The Ghost of 2007: Burnham's "Woman Problem"

06:13 - Ed Miliband's Chancellor Dilemma

07:18 - How Departments Are Pandering to Burnham

08:29 - Is David Miliband Making a Comeback?

10:54 - The Real Reason Angela Rayner Has Been Weakened

13:10 - Burnham's Frustration with Westminster "Ambulance Chasers"

16:56 - A Long Goodbye: Starmer's Farewell Barbecues

17:30 - The £15 Billion Defence Plan Black Hole

18:20 - Government Paralysis and the Rochdale Case

This podcast was brought to you thanks to subscribers of The Times and The Sunday Times. To enjoy unlimited digital access to all our journalism subscribe here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I always make a point of reading Tom Watson’s Substack and doing so today was particularly gratifying. We drew more or less the same conclusion from Andy Burnham’s first big speech as prime minister presumptive.

Most of the criticism of said speech you might have yesterday was reflexively brutal. Some wrote the whole thing off before it was even finished. Burnham spoke about Manchester in Manchester, dressed half-casually in what he calls his “Manchester clothes”. He told us of his plans to open a prime ministerial office in Manchester, too, and of the untested philosophy of national government he calls Manchesterism.

Then he got into his car, having taken no questions from us travelling hacks, and quoted Is It Really So Strange? – a Smiths B-side. I left the north, I travelled south/I found a tiny house and I can’t help the way I feel…

The Smiths were from Manchester, by the way. And so much of the commentary on the speech went like this: nice enough delivery, but is that it? Manchester, Manchesterism, mayors, and the former mayor of Greater Manchester doing Manchesterism from an office in Manchester? Doesn’t he know any other tunes? What’s the plan? Where’s the detail?

I do understand this criticism, even if levelling it requires a bare minimum of intellectual energy. Expend a little more of it – and even then, only a little – and the substantive point of Burnham’s speech is right there, hiding in plain sight, signposted as baldly as THE NORTH is along the M6. Tom puts it well: “The speech should not be filed under local government, mayoral ambition, or northern mood music.” Burnham had, in fact, “made a speech about the structure of the British state”. I agree, and explain why at greater length in my dispatch from the People’s History Museum for Tuesday’s Times.

Subscribe to The Times

Westminster got a nasty whiff of gimmickry from No 10 North, Burnham’s new branch of Downing Street. The name alone evokes countless other unloved and underpowered satellite campuses of the public sector – enforced and resentful moves to the provinces, expensed trains, monthly deputations of the really important people who still live and work in London.

But, as I put it in the first line of my piece – if you don’t have a subscription already, you can spend a quid to get three months of access to the full thing and everything else The Times offers – it is a deceptively substantial idea. “It would be the biggest constitutional change in 100 years,” one of the Burnham brains trust told me earlier.

That’s probably a bit hyperbolic. But, if we’re talking about No 10-11 relations specifically, perhaps only a bit. Here’s how Burnham himself described it.

We will create a more streamlined state with a clearer purpose: to power up all parts of the country and put a laser-like focus on growth and regeneration. Good growth.

The change will be driven through the prime minister’s office in an extended operation based here in Manchester. But here’s the important thing – it will only be based here.

The job of No 10 North will be to make power flow into the Midlands, into the South West, into the East of England and, yes, into London as I said before, as much as the North East, Yorkshire & the Humber and here in the North West.

A little later, he offered this very clear outline of its mandate.

No 10 North will support the regions on three clear tasks: reform of essential utilities, reindustrialisation, and the regeneration of places.

Read that all again. Those three clear tasks are three chunky macroeconomic priorities. And they will be driven through the prime minister’s office. Deceptively substantial indeed. Very quickly it struck me that Our Andy branding obscured the seriousness of intent. This is the most serious challenge – let’s put it no more strongly than that yet – to Treasury authority in half a century.

A couple of conversations with Burnham people confirmed me in my view. That was the real point. It was also elucidated in public. Lucy Powell was on The World at One just after the speech. She said: “This new office of No 10 of the North… didn’t sound like a branch office of No 10, but sounded like a really powerful reimagining of some government machinery that is there to work with places to really distribute the power and resources that people need.”

Really the “No 10” bit matters just as much, if not more, than the suffixed “North”. The prime minister will be taking control and ownership of a very clear set of economic priorities. “The political direction I set will not be up for negotiation,” Burnham said in a passage that was notionally about whipping but may as well have been addressed to the Treasury. What really matters, I concluded in my Times piece, is this: “The levers of economic power that will make or break our next government’s priorities will indeed be leaving London. But it’s Burnham who’ll be pulling them.”

There’s a broader discussion of these ideas – and whether it will work – on this week’s episode of the State of It podcast, too.

To me the obvious point of comparison is Harold Wilson’s Department of Economic Affairs. Watson’s Substack makes the same point at greater length than I could in the paper.

Wilson wanted a growth department to challenge a control department. That was the logic of the Department of Economic Affairs, created under George Brown after Labour won office in 1964. The Treasury kept tax, spending, monetary policy, sterling and the Budget. The DEA was given planning, industrial strategy, prices and incomes, regional economic policy and consultation with industry.

The DEA failed – and quite quickly at that – because the Treasury kept control of the budget and thus won the battle for supremacy on Whitehall. This was not what Brown’s cabinet colleagues expected at the outset of Wilson’s first term. Reflecting on their first month in office, Richard Crossman noted in his diary on 22nd November 1964 that the economic affairs secretary was “becoming the deputy prime minister, in charge of the home front”. He went on:

That suits me perfectly well. But there is a very delicate relationship between George Brown and myself because he, as head of the DEA, is responsible for economic planning, and I, as minister of housing, am in charge of physical planning. Almost inevitably there is a collision between my well-established job and George Brown’s new ideas.

By 3rd January – barely ten weeks after Wilson’s arrival in office – Crossman can basically see that the experiment will fail.

Though George Brown is a great success, the division of power between the DEA and the Treasury is a development for which we are having to pay a heavy price in divided authority and dissension in central planning.

On the eve of the government’s first proper budget, April 5th, Crossman records his pleasant surprise that the cabinet meeting at which it was finalised was a mere formality.

In fact, it turned out to be a pretty good budget without any of the rows and alarms the press had taught us to expect as a result of the deadlock between George Brown and James Callaghan… in the battle between the Treasury and the DEA, the Treasury is coming out on top in terms of prestige and status.

A fortnight later, on Easter Sunday, Crossman’s all but called it.

The planning of economic policy, which was supposed to be Brown’s essential contribution, had hardly started in the DEA – what planning there is is still basically done in the Treasury. It is the economists and officials there who have had all the influence, not those who were taken out of the Treasury and put on Brown’s staff at the DEA.

Edmund Dell, who I’ll try not to quote for a third time in a week when I next write, concluded in his history of the chancellorship that the DEA never really overcame this existential question: “If neither department was superior to the other, how would decisions be made in those cases where the two departments had different priorities?”

Despite Wilson’s grand ambitions, the answer turned out to be the same as it ever was. The Treasury decided, just as it has when other economic departments materialise as challengers to its power. Think BEIS, DLUHC, and sometimes – but not always – DESNZ. Brown forming what Crossman euphemistically describes “rather dissolute” habits didn’t help either.

Burnham’s response to this troubled history is the firm smack of prime ministerial authority. You’d assume that Dell’s question is answered more straightforwardly if one of the two departments belongs to the big boss, otherwise known, lest we forget, as First Lord of the Treasury. (Of course, No 10 is not a department. Not yet, anyway.) Wilson did take control of the DEA himself in the end – in 1967, with Peter Shore as secretary of state in name only – but by then it was much too late.

Here’s Watson again: “The DEA had the plan. The Treasury had the purse. The DEA could argue; the Treasury could refuse. The DEA could talk about production, regions and long-term renewal; the Treasury controlled the Budget, sterling and the spending machine. There is the warning for Burnham.” Quite right. As is this: “No 10 North will be judged not by where it is based, or what it is called, but by whether Whitehall actually gives up authority.” This time it is the prime minister who is telling them to stand and deliver. Can the next one succeed where none before had?

Whenever I write about Labour history in The Times I hear from proper experts in the field, most even nerdier than I, in very short order. On Monday night, just after my piece from Manchester went live, I was reminded by one of them of another experiment in driving Labour’s economic policy from outside of the Treasury. So I picked up a book that’s been gathering dust on my desk in our parliamentary office for a while: the 2001 edition of Bernard Donoughue and G.W. Jones’s life of Herbert Morrison.

The job Morrison really wanted after the 1945 election, of course, was Clement Attlee’s. But his plot to force a leadership ballot of the PLP before Attlee could go to the Palace never got off the ground. Then he asked for the Foreign Office. Attlee rebuffed him, then suggested Morrison become Lord President of the Council – “a sort of overlord on the home front”, responsible first and foremost for economic planning, nationalisation – including of utlities – and getting it all through parliament under a sensible legislative timetable.

Morrison knew he was probably on a hiding to nothing. As Donoughue and Jones note, he “at first refused, aware that a co-ordinating minister without portfolio is at a disadvantage in any confrontation with a great officer of state”. This instruction from Ernest Bevin to a No 10 official is a case in point. “Keep your eye on ‘Erbert when I’m not ‘ere, Francis. Let me know if he gets up to any of his tricks. I wouldn’t trust the little bugger any further than I could throw him.” So too this characteristically sniffy verdict from the FT at the time: “He is spreading a veneer of planning gospel over a vast deal of higgledy-piggledy departmental practice.”

Still, it unquestionably worked for a little while. Morrison roamed across the piste of government and built mechanisms for delivery that achieved most of what Labour had set out to achieve in its 1945 manifesto, which promised to nationalise the economy’s commanding heights but offered next to nothing on the how. The same criticism has been made of Burnham’s speech, of course.

But barely two years later, in September 1947, Attlee created the first Department of Economic Affairs to counterbalance Hugh Dalton’s Treasury – there’s nothing new in Labour politics, really – and gave that job to Stafford Cripps, who seized much of Morrison’s brief. Barely two months later, Dalton had quit, Cripps was chancellor, and the Treasury began to reassert its dominance after a bad war.

Again, a new model of economic policymaking and delivery doesn’t survive for all that long. The Treasury fights back. The chancellor subjugates a prime ministerial plenipotentiary because, ultimately, Morrison or Brown or whoever is not actually the prime minister and can thus be squeezed out if the prime minister himself isn’t willing to die in a ditch for them.

Oswald Mosley also learned this at the cost of his own sanity and place in posterity. His appointment as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster by Ramsay MacDonald at the height of the Great Depression was not, whatever MacDonald had implied and Mosley rashly assumed, an invitation to rewrite British economic policy in its entirety.

Mosley rubbed everyone up the wrong way – not least a younger Morrison – and when he implored the prime minister to adopt his proto-Keynesian ideas as a fiscal vaccine for unemployment, MacDonald inevitably sided with Philip Snowden, the dry-as-dust chancellor who had forgone his old radicalism to embrace the Treasury and its Victorian orthodoxies.

They too embraced him, Churchill observed, with “the fervour of two long-separated kindred lizards”. Mosley resigned, the Treasury and its Victorian orthodoxy won, then came 1931 and Labour’s ruin.

So yeah. You could well understand, given all this history, why no Labour government since Wilson has not dared to challenge the Treasury in any serious way. Even Tony Blair bottled it. In 2003, he wanted to check the power of Gordon Brown and so his intimates devised a plan to split the Treasury in two. Here’s the Times report in which it was first revealed, from July 2010.

Operation Teddy Bear has, until today, remained a secret kept within the walls of No 10. It was so named to avoid the slightest hint of its intention and was devised by Lord Mandelson, John Birt, the former BBC chief who became a No 10 adviser, and Jonathan Powell, Mr Blair’s chief of staff.

Under the plan, a US-style Office of Budget and Delivery would be taken from the Treasury, leaving Mr Brown in charge of a new Ministry of Finance to handle macroeconomics, taxation, markets and financial services. Crucially Mr Brown would have lost control of departmental purse strings.

Mr Blair, increasingly infuriated by what he saw as Mr Brown’s block on reform, agonised over the idea for several weeks, knowing that his decision might determine the fate of his second term and his record as Prime Minister.

When he outlined the plan to Mr Brown, the Chancellor responded with a flat “No”.

Subscribe to The Times

Blair was unwilling to impose it by fiat and so the plan died a quick and lonely death. Brown was too strong, too dangerous. Burnham, by contrast, is seeking to check the power of the Treasury himself, by enhancing the authority and responsibilities of his own office. He has made that as the founding principle of his premiership, and whoever he hires as chancellor will have to sign up to No 10 North before entering No 11. That warning from his speech again: “The political direction I set will not be up for negotiation.”

But that clear marker of prime ministerial power is designed to be the difference neither Harold, Herbert nor the teddy bear could make.

Burnham's debut speech caused headlines with his bold plans to reshape the British state. But there are difficult questions lurking behind the rhetoric, namely what does any of it actually mean? Plus, Reform UK gears up to choose their top candidates to challenge Burnham in his own backyard.

Steven Swinford, political editor, The Times

Lara Spirit, deputy political editor, The Sunday Times

Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator, The Times

Producers: Euan Dawtrey, Harry Kitson

Executive producer: Molly Guinness

Picture: Getty Images

Audio: Reuters

Email us: thestateofit@thetimes.co.uk

00:00 The Return of David Miliband?

02:53 The Miliband Brothers Psychodrama

04:23 Labour's "Boys Club" Optics Problem

08:02 The Brutal Fight for Top Cabinet Jobs

11:20 How Burnham is Manipulating Westminster

13:56 Burnham vs Starmer: The Real Difference

16:27 The Hidden Cost of Devolution (Tax Rises?)

19:31 What is "Number 10 North" Really About?

22:31 Why the Tories Fear Ed Miliband as Chancellor

25:29 Nigel Farage's Secret Plot for the North

27:35 The £5 Million Farage Crypto Investigation

This podcast was brought to you thanks to subscribers of The Times and The Sunday Times. To enjoy unlimited digital access to all our journalism subscribe here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The first thing I should say about this column is that it was written before Shabana Mahmood – who I name alongside Ed Miliband as one of the two leading candidates for No 11 – tried to brief Mike Tapp out of his job as immigration minister, only to be rebuffed by Downing Street. The timing of this little contretemps is less than ideal.

There is no single or settled view on the Treasury question among Burnham’s close supporters but it is fair to say those who were most enthusiastic about Mahmood’s candidacy yesterday are this morning markedly less certain they will get their woman than they were 24 hours ago. But in any case, it will all come down to the next prime minister. We should understand what he wants, not merely who he wants. And that’s what I set out in the column.

Subscribe to The Times

The checklist, described to me by someone involved in discussions over the appointment, is roughly as follows:

1. They must be competent enough to do the job, and know their economics.

2. They must be able to impose Burnham’s priorities onto the Treasury, whatever they are: can they deliver meaningful fiscal devolution, speedy and meaningful cost-of-living interventions, etc?

3. They must understand they are there to deliver Burnham’s priorities – not their own. He knows better than anyone that he cannot afford to bake instability into the commanding heights of government with a TB-GBs redux.

4. They must be able to say to Burnham: I know the PLP are telling you they can’t wear this, they’re kicking and screaming, but we can’t do everything. You’ve told me what I should prioritise in order to deliver on your agenda. Here is where we should spend our political capital – and actual capital – with the PLP.

That – yesterday, at least – left Mahmood and Miliband in properly serious contention, though this morning I got a WhatsApp making the case for Pat McFadden: “At least with Pat, you know what you’re buying.” Even before that landed in my inbox I noted that Burnham is enthused by the Milburn review of youth unemployment, but I’m still reluctant to put my fiver on Pat.

That quote, though, speaks to one of the downside risks of a Miliband appointment – which is to say he has his own extensively developed theory of political economy. One of his friends told me earlier this week: “If Ed becomes chancellor it will be the culmination of his entire life’s ambition to remake capitalism itself. That will be quite difficult to control.” Other allies contend – as The Times revealed the other day – that he is developing economic policy for Andy, and so this talk of wish fulfillment is a little overdone.

They make another argument, too: that only Miliband can do the Nixon-goes-to-China thing on welfare reform and adherence to the fiscal rules. As much as we might think the appointment of James Purnell as Burnham’s chief of staff is a fork-in-the-road moment for this embryonic premiership, it’s worth remembering – and I was encouraged to do so by someone who knew both men well in the New Labour years – that Miliband apparently regrets that he did push harder on making work pay at the Cabinet Office in 2007 and 2008, or in the 2010 manifesto he wrote for Brown. Purnell, too, was making a communitarian case for welfare reform in his first couple of years out of the Commons – read the details in my Times profile of the guy here.

Get four months of The Times for £1

Mahmood hasn’t yet spoken to Burnham about the chancellorship. Unlike Miliband, who covets the Treasury, her mind is not entirely settled. Those who know her best – indeed, she’s said this to me herself – know she is motivated by a duty and service and if asked to serve by Burnham she’d be inclined to say yes. But only if she was sure it was to implement an agenda she thought right for the country. She won’t leave the Home Office – or give up custody of immigration reform – lightly. Maybe that’s all a moot point now, but let’s see.

Another thing: North Sea oil and gas. Even as he crowdsurfed into Stubshaw Cross Labour Club in the early hours of last Friday morning it did not escape Burnham’s notice that the Tories – the Tories! – had won in Aberdeen South on a pro-drilling ticket. As I put it in The Times today, he’s not daft: he saw the GMB’s Gary Smith this week, can see which way the winds of Scottish politics are blowing, and he also needs economic growth. Here we might pause to note Miliband’s deceptive flexibility on his own net-zero theology. He has already authorised new drilling under existing licences – fat lot of gratitude it got him from the industry – and may see the approval of the new Jackdaw gas field for domestic consumption as an off-ramp.

Decisions, decisions – all of them likely to elicit some degree of moaning from the PLP. Maybe the biggest test for the new chancellor is temperamental. I open the column with this quote from Edmund Dell, historian of the Treasury and intellectual referee of Labour economics: that not one inhabitant of No 11 “had yet found either the recipe that would transform the performance of the British economy or even, as a lesser and more practical objective, how to manage it without repeated disasters and humiliations”. But it’s another quote from Dell – this one from his speech to the Commons before he joined Roy Jenkins and the pro-Europe rebels in 1972 – that I think gets to the nub of the job Burnham’s chancellor will have to do.

My party says ‘no’, and my judgement says ‘yes’. Can I vote ‘no’ tonight against my judgement on this great issue? I have no alternative but to vote in accordance with my judgement.

They’ll have to make, sustain and win arguments for their judgement – for Burnham’s judgement – on the economy and fiscal policy. And, if necessary, tell the PLP they’re wrong. We can certainly expect some backlash if this response to the column from a serving minister is anything to go by:

Treasury orthodoxy is not Andy’s problem, it’s his solution. The 2nd half of your piece is right

Welfare reform, north sea, tax policies being properly costed rather than implemented with bags of wishful thinking etc. that’s what they need.

So I think it is less “who can get HMT to change” and more “who can do the politics and argument to the left in favour of orthodoxy”

Decisions, decisions. Party management is going to fall to the chancellor as much as it will Burnham or his chief whip. Sir Keir Starmer has spent the week imploring people to make that job as easy as possible. I had sight of his full speech to staff, supporters and MPs in the No 10 rose garden on Monday night, and quoted bits of this peroration in my column:

I will now work through the next few weeks dutifully doing everything I must do for the government, making sure there’s an orderly transition, and I want to make sure that what comes next is a success. I will ensure to do everything I can to make it a success.

We have three more years of this Labour government, hopefully five more years after that, and I want it to go on to be hugely successful, and therefore I will be working here across government and with the candidates to make sure that whoever comes here has the best chance of succeeding and gets off to the very best of starts that they possibly can, and I’ll ask all of you to do that as well.

We’ve done so much for our party already. Please let’s do this next bit. Let’s do it in good spirits.

Then, on Tuesday, he told the cabinet:

I won’t be doing talk radio, I won’t be doing commentary. There won’t be backseat commentary from me.

Lots of people feared Starmer would be stroppy and indignant as he left office but his conduct this week has been a study in magnanimity, however furious, upset and betrayed I’m told he really feels. Whether the 50-or-so loyalist MPs who walked tearily up Downing Street to his living wake want to exercise the same restraint is now the crucial question. Lots of them feel broken and humiliated and hopeless for advancement under Burnham. To them his rise to power has felt a bit like a revenge mission for previously downtrodden factions of the PLP.

Burnham could do worse than show them it isn’t. The best advice on this, I think, comes from Jimmy Reid’s extemporised speech at the beginning of the Upper Clyde shipbuilders work-in of 1971.

There will be no hooliganism, there will be no vandalism, there will be no bevvying, because the world is watching us, and it is our responsibility to conduct ourselves with responsibility, and with dignity, and with maturity.

In other words, pull it all back together – not smash it up. MPs often felt demeaned and ignored under Starmer, which is one of the reasons his premiership ended in the hasty and undignified way it came to pass. A couple of weeks ago Burnham told me he did not want to run the PLP through fear or coercion, nor ignore its cries of pain. He’s said his Catholic faith is about “the innate equality of every single human being, whatever their circumstances” – even, presumably, if they have weird and challenging predilections like Starmerism.

So no hooliganism, no vandalism, no bevvying. If the House of Commons terrace on Monday was anything to go by, that last battle might be lost already. But it could all fall apart very quickly if there’s no sincere gesture towards consensus and inclusivity. I mentioned the need for a Jimmy Reid approach to party management on Monday’s Politics Live. Polly Billington, a Burnham backer, said: “I’m not a football follower. Explain your analogy.” I hope that’s done the job.

It's a transition beset with bad blood and uncertainty and also some serious technical hurdles. Is he building a plane mid-flight or is he more like Gromit, sitting on a speeding train, laying down the track in front of him?

The biggest unanswered question facing Andy Burnham is who will be his chancellor. Three names are in contention: bookmakers' favourite Wes Streeting, rank outsider Shabana Mahmood, and Ed Miliband — the bête noire of the bond markets.

Patrick reports from parliament's bars, where the champagne is flowing and Labour MPs have suddenly become shameless attention-seekers, hoping to seduce Andy Burnham's allies.

Steven Swinford, political editor, The Times

Lara Spirit, deputy political editor, The Sunday Times

Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator, The Times

Producers: Euan Dawtrey, Harry Kitson

Executive producer: Molly Guinness

Picture: Getty Images

Audio: Reuters

Email us: thestateofit@thetimes.co.uk

0:00 - Can Andy Burnham Build the Plane Mid-Flight?

1:15 - Drama on the Commons Terrace: Euphoria & Champagne

4:20 - Keir Starmer's "Revenge" Timetable

6:30 - The Next Chancellor: Miliband vs. Streeting vs. Mahmood

13:12 - Scrapping the Triple Lock & Upcoming Wealth Taxes

17:37 - Inside Number 10: Starmer's Farewell Speech

19:33 - The £10bn Defence Plan Rupturing Labour

21:55 - Civil Service Gridlock: Why Access Talks Are Delayed

25:20 - The Crypto Billionaire Bankrolling Nigel Farage & Reform UK

29:00 - Will There Be an Emergency Election?

This podcast was brought to you thanks to subscribers of The Times and The Sunday Times. To enjoy unlimited digital access to all our journalism subscribe here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Also today, where did all go wrong for Keir Starmer and what did Labour MPs think of his resignation speech?

Wes Streeting has said he will not contest Andy Burnham for the Labour leadership, but are there any other possible candidates for the leadership contest?

Steven Swinford, political editor, The Times

Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator, The Times

Executive producer: Molly Guinness

Producers: Harry Kitson, Euan Dawtrey

Picture credit: Getty Images

Audio: Reuters

00:00 — Starmer’s Resignation: The Total Lack of Contrition

00:48 — A Surreal Timeline: Six Prime Ministers in a Decade

01:56 — The Emotional Exit vs. The Bitter Backroom Reality

03:04 — Where It Went Wrong: Sins of Tone & Policy U-Turns

04:30 — The Brutal Verdict: "He Wasn't Up To It"

05:47 — Outsourcing Power: Sue Gray, McSweeney, and Rachel Reeves

08:46 — Enter Andy Burnham: Can He Rebrand the Labour Party?

11:36 — Ed Miliband vs. The Financial Markets

14:31 — Team Burnham's Impossible Economic Trade-offs

16:36 — Will the Gloss Wear Off? The Unforgiving Spotlight of No. 10

18:24 — Legitimacy Crisis: Nigel Farage Demands an Early Election

20:06 — The Whitehall Machine in Total Chaos

This podcast was brought to you thanks to subscribers of The Times and The Sunday Times. To enjoy unlimited digital access to all our journalism subscribe here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The significance I attribute to this little tableau in last weekend’s Times Saturday essay might be lost on lobby colleagues who have approached Ashton – the one in Makerfield, the home of the now legendary Stubshaw Cross Labour Club, and to most outsiders the sum total of what they see of the constituency – in an Uber from Wigan North Western.

Subscribe to The Times

But on every weekend of this campaign I have driven in from Southport, and so St Oswalds – yet and perhaps never to attain the same notoreity of the one a mile north-east – took up residence in an outsized plot of my subconscious. As I first drove past on the morning Andy Burnham launched his campaign to become MP for this club, that club and the chapels that once set the rhythm of life in these corners of Wigan, I did wonder whether he’d ever drank in there.

I’m sure he will soon. For Andy Burnham is a Catholic. To say so in Wigan borough or Liverpool or Manchester, to name but three of the places he might claim as home, would be utterly unremarkable – sure, isn’t everyone round here? But as he prepares to take that same train back to Westminster on Monday, this ordinary fact of south Lancashire life rewards a moment’s reflection.

Burnham knows that he will be the first true Catholic prime minister his country has ever known. I have been told he feels the historical and cultural weight of owning a distinction what will to many people seem like an anachronistic irrelevance, or, at best, a contested pub quiz answer.

To be clear, by that I mean a cradle Catholic who lived and breathed the faith into which he was born. Set this standard and Boris Johnson and Tony Blair, lapsed and a convert respectively, do not really count. Andy Burnham is a Catholic, the kind of Catholic everyone born and raised in the northwest of England will know, and it explains much that Westminster otherwise struggles to understand or take seriously about his political identity. And that’s what the essay, which – as ever – you should subscribe to The Times to read in full, was all about.

I spent some time with Burnham in what is now his constituency a few weeks ago, and, while we did not speak about the Church, or Catholicism for more than a sentence or two, the Catholic Church – or rather the popular, cultural Catholicism he embodies – was everywhere. We met, one Saturday lunchtime, at Wigan St Jude’s rugby league club in Worsley Mesnes. At the bar he reminisced about his son’s youth games and of other clubs like Leigh Miners and St Pat’s. And there it was, defiantly alive, if only in 13 men and inherited iconography: the old collective life the mineworkers and massgoers knew.

Then we watched the Challenge Cup final. That made for another piece in The Times, which you can read here. Anyway, Wigan won, and the celebrations went undisturbed thanks to a Burnham moratiorium on canvassing. I repeated to him something I’d been told on a previous visit to the Makerfield constituency – by an old local who had all but given up on the old politics. These towns had been once been defined by – built by – the Labour Party, Catholic Church and rugby league. Together they were the totality of working class experience. Now the people only really bothered with league, a sport whose administration has come to look as dysfunctional as those other two institutions.

Read in full: subscribe to The Times

I suppose this is what David Storey was predicting – or hoping against hope for – at the elegaic end of This Sporting Life. Storey, himself an accomplished league player, is remembered as one of the angry young men of Sixties letters but this is really a sad, hopeless novel about the ever-narrowing horizons of manhood in that England, and the inevitable violence that follows both acquiesence and resistance. At the end of the story, an entire town has lined the streets to doff their caps to an industrialist’s hearse. His name is Slomer, and he owned the people’s work (the factory) as well as their play (the rugby league team).

The mourners know they are bidding farewell to something more than a man. The Sixties have only just begun but already the old paternalism and sense of place feels threatened by what we’d now just call globalisation. Note the name of the landmark church.

‘With Slomer gone,’ the man told him, ‘you’ll find the big combines finding it easier to move into town. You mark my words. There’ll be no king-pin anymore. We’ll become like all the other big towns – socialist, impersonal, anonymous. The only thing we’ll be known by’ – he waved his gloved hand at me – ‘will be the standard of our football team.’

He stared out at the crowd as the column wound up Market Street towards St Teresa’s. It was hot. ‘Just look at that,’ he said. ‘There won’t be any more funerals where half the town lines the streets to watch the passing of a man they hardly knew…’ He flicked his gloved fingers. ‘We’ll have a football team.’

George fingered his tight collar. ‘And thank God for that,’ he said.

Storey was writing about Yorkshire but so it subsequently proved in Wigan, and thank God for that indeed. Without league there’d be little else. Here we might pause to note that Tony Blair, one of the guilty men of Burnham’s forty years of neoliberalism, said in 2005 that his favourite Premier League player was Wigan Athletic’s Arjan de Zeeuw. The only thing we’ll be known by will be the standard of our football team, and even then it’ll be the wrong code.

Note too that St Jude is the patron saint of lost causes. When he announced his candidacy for Makerfield last month, Burnham appeared to have taken one on. It was, as Morrissey sang on Well I Wonder – the sort of Smiths album track both the incumbent prime minister and the next one say they were mainlining in their youth – “the final stand of all I am”. And this victorious Labour campaign proved that the old political certainties – that voters in Ashton and Bryn and Hindley will vote for the party that was made in and for their towns – are gasping, dying… but somehow still alive…

Burnham did it with a message that Westminster tastemakers and his goggle-eyed critics in government find insultingly, infuriatingly Panglossian. Hope, change, abolish the whip, public control, Northern Soul, keep the faith, our Andy, that London, babby’s yed on a buttered barm, don’t you dare cross Anneliese and Lou, place first, change Labour but only once I’ve bought a parakeet at the Stubshaw Cross exotic bird auction. There is a popular school of elite criticism on this guy – he went to Cambridge and worked for Tessa Jowell and ran from the right defending Iraq in 2010 and then he said his favourite biscuit was chips and gravy ha ha ha – and to its foremost scholars the past month will have seemed like an exercise in self-parody.

And the critics might well be turn out to be right about Burnham’s flaws and the fiscal rules and whatever else. Even his allies admit there’s not much meat on those bones yet. What they aren’t getting, though, is the man. I put that line about Makerfield to him – the one about Labour and the Church and rugby league. He laid down his Cruzcampo and replied, a little wistfully, that he always used to say that there were only three institutions that mattered to him – the Holy Trinity of Burnhamism. Everton FC, the Labour Party, and the Catholic Church, “in that order”. And he did always used to say that, long before he was a candidate for the Labour leadership.

Now he is the MP for a Catholic constituency and will be our first Catholic prime minister. He – and the constituency – wear it lightly, though one of his enforcers would only take a butter pie from Galloway’s bakers on Fridays. It’s about culture, not doctrine. But neither can escape it. In Makerfield’s towns and churches and pubs and clubs and schools and rugby league shirts is the entire history of northern Catholicism: the recusants and then the Irish, the rich and the poor, both struggling for dignity, freedom of belief and political expression London had denied them. They found it in the Labour Party their descendants were on the brink of abandoning before Burnham came back. Once you understand that this is the world he inhabits, all that is vague can at last seem precise. His values were born of time and faith and place.

We could start in the Sir Thomas Gerard, the Wetherspoons in Ashton named after a recusant patriarch. Or up the road, opposite the Catholic club – now officially renamed, like the Labour clubs in Bryn and Hindley and indeed Stubshaw Cross, as a mere social club – at the Church of St Oswald and St Edmund Arrowsmith. The latter of those two saints was martyred for his priesthood in 1628 and gave his name to Eddie Arrow’s, the Catholic school to which Burnham sent his three kids and Reform UK’s Robert Kenyon himself attended. Both mentioned it to me. Arrowsmith’s black and withered hand still sits in a little glass jar inside the chapel. Every year they take it to Brindle, near Chorley, for a mass in the attic of a house where Arrowsmith used to preach in secret.

There are martyrs everywhere in Makerfield. Orrell has St John Rigby College, named for one of the few laymen among the Forty Martyrs of English Catholicism. Even on the scaffold at Newgate, where he was executed in 1600, he refused to recant. He believed til the very last. Thomas Worthington, another Wigan recusant, wrote a memoir of Rigby’s martyrdom the following year: “The deputy asked him, what traitors dost thou know in England? God is my witness, said he, I know none.” He prayed “cheerfully” for Queen Elizabeth. It so enraged his executioners that one put his boot on Rigby’s neck. It silenced him in life but not posterity.

Arrowsmith was the same. In the dock, he spoke in sorrow, not anger.

Be witnesses with me that I die a constant Roman Catholic and for Christ’s sake. Let my death be an encouragement to your going forward in the Catholic religion… Nothing grieves me so much as this England, which I pray God soon to convert.

It was not so much God that converted the parishes of south Lancashire to out and proud Catholicism, but Ireland. They came and dug the coal, milled the cotton, worked the machines, loaded the ships, laid the bricks. Lots in Wigan, of course – between St Oswald’s and Stubshaw Cross, on the Bryn Road, is the Brian Boru, one of the oldest Irish clubs in England – but many more in Liverpool, the city of Burnham’s birth. And the time and faith and place of which I wrote above add up to Derek Worlock’s Archdiocese of Liverpool in the 1980s.

To the extent that Worlock is remembered outside of Liverpool now, it is as one of the many men of cloth who became moral critics of Thatcherism. And that is what he was. Clashing with the police over Toxteth, vainly seeking to mediate between Scargill and the National Coal Board – did Burnham think of that when he saw the miners picketing Parkside colliery on the way to school? – sending Pope John Paul II’s motorcade through the charred wreckage of Liverpool 8. Burnham remembers him as the high priest of a practical Catholicism, conscious of the need for a new ministry designed for the urban working class. “I am my brother’s keeper,” Worlock said in 1990, “and he’s sleeping pretty rough these days.” Like Burnham, he was no fundamentalist. He took a hard line against Opus Dei and clashed with Rome over contraception and gluten-free communion wafers.

A few years later, in 1994, came a film called Priest. Jimmy McGovern wrote the screenplay. Linus Roache stars as Father Greg, a tortured young clergyman in a Liverpool parish. He’s gay, and his priest in charge, the strident leftie Father Thomas – played by Tom Wilkinson – is sleeping with his housekeeper. In confession, a schoolgirl tells Father Greg that her own father is sexually abusing her. He cannot bring himself to violate the sacrament. He picks up a man in a club and enters into a relationship with him. The girl’s mother discovers the abuse, and blames Greg. The police happen upon him and his boyfriend in a car park, then arrest him. But Father Thomas forgives him. He invites Greg back from rural exile and lets him administer communion.

McGovern and Antonia Bird, the director, wanted to film it in Liverpool. But they were rumbled. The plot and its implications seemed scandalous – sacreligious. Worlock, however, did not judge. Here’s McGovern.

When we did Priest we lost all our locations once word got out about the subject. No one in Liverpool would have anything to do with us so we had to bus 60 kids down to London in their communion frocks to film but when Derek Worlock watched it he called it a profoundly Catholic film and said what’s all the fuss?

This was the faith in which Burnham was raised. Again, a practical Catholicism, not a doctrinal one. On the centenary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, Worlock unwrapped a copy of that encylical with theatrical flourish. Catholic social teaching, he said, was “the Church’s best-kept secret”. But not in the Culcheth church where Burnham was the altar boy, pressing play on tapes of Worlock’s sermons. “The stuff in the catechisms, and what I heard Worlock say,” he has said, “the political implementation of it was the Labour Party.” It’s not the Catholicism of JD Vance or even Tony Blair. Burnham knows this: the first time he ran for the Labour leadership he admitted neither he nor his mother Eileen, from whom he inherited his faith, were ones for “licking the altar steps”.

It wasn’t just Worlock, of course. In 2015, Burnham cited Boys from the Blackstuff as a crystallising influence on his inchoate, teenage politics. He spoke specifically of Yosser’s descent into madness – the slow and then sudden surrender of all his sanity and self-respect. And where does Yosser Hughes go when he knows he cannot sink any lower, when all the machismo is gone? Wheezing, weeping into the confessional.

“Father... father...”

“Yes?”

“I’m... I’m... I’m... I’m Yosser Hughes. I’m desperate, father.”

“It can be a desperate world at times, Mr Hughes.”

“Yosser Hughes.”

“It can be a desperate world at times, Yosser Hughes. Tell me, would it make it any easier if... a trouble shared in a place of peace, my son. A haven... I’m Father Thomas. Doubting for short. Doubting Thomas. Daniel Thomas. I’m here to help you, Yosser Hughes. Daniel – don’t worry about the Father.”

“I’m desperate, Father.”

“Call me Dan. Dan.”

“I’m desperate, Dan.”

The new trad types wouldn’t think it deserved this deserved to be called Catholicism at all. The most authentic rebuttal to this charge of wanting piety comes from Joe Gormley, the Ashton-born NUM leader I quote in the essay. He was a Wigan Catholic too, and, like Burnham, not one for hugging the altar. He and his pit mates liked a drink, a wager, whatever. But, Gormley said: “I don’t believe you have to go to church every Sunday to be a good, or even a religious, person.”

This kind of Catholicism was impossible to escape in Worlock’s Liverpool. Consider the music. Like the rugby league shirts of the clubs for which Burnham is now member of parliament, it reflects without theological or doctrinal endorsement the prevailing culture. Take this forgotten anthem, Pete Wylie’s last proper hit.

Hey Joe, I’ve never understood
When the elders are so wicked, why should we be good?
It’s sinful (sinful)
So true…
Don’t cry, don’t let it get you down
Hey Joe, we oughta try and turn the world around
It’s sinful (sinful)
So true, boo hoo…

Or this, from OMD. These aren’t really Catholic songs but songs that could have only been written by bright kids in a Catholic city, doubtful and questioning of authority – holy and secular – yet still laden with the cultural baggage they picked up involuntarily at birth. See also: Newcastle’s Neil Tennant.

Burnham files Everton alongside all this too. Solidarity, the “underdog” – classic Bluenose – the conviction that Thatcherism was at the end of the day just an affront to human dignity. “Yes, I do go to church,” he said in 2007. “I am a Catholic. It’s a bit like being an Everton supporter – once a Blue, always a Blue.” The belief is unthinking, and I don’t mean that pejoratively. These values – woolly though they may seem, if fellow sons and daughters of Merseyside’s outer boroughs will pardon that pun – were just indisputably true. Injustice was done to working people in Liverpool and its environs by what Burnham still calls “the London set”. Scouse political mythology hymns a “city that dared to fight” under the leadership of Derek Hatton.

But, as another old archbishop told me the other day, it was the other Derek – the one who dared to forgive – who played the crucial role in Burnham’s political formation. It’s all about values and culture. The specifics of the doctrine or smallprint of this policy or that don’t matter so much if you stay true the other two. Father Derek, not Brother Degsy. Francis, not Benedict.

Anyway, that – in case you were wondering – is what he believes. Let’s see how it works out in government.

Listen to find out which cabinet ministers are thinking of resigning after Makerfield and which senior figure has been ghosting the PM.

If Andy Burnham does get to Number 10, the whole direction of his premiership will depend on who he picks for his cabinet. We bring you the latest on what his team is thinking.

And of course it's also possible that Reform UK could beat Labour in Makerfield — what then?

Steven Swinford, political editor, The Times

Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator, The Times

Lara Spirit, deputy political editor, The Sunday Times

Executive producer: Molly Guinness

Video editor: George Clare

Picture credit: Getty Images

Audio: Times Radio

This podcast was brought to you thanks to subscribers of The Times and The Sunday Times. To enjoy unlimited digital access to all our journalism subscribe here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Steven Swinford, political editor, The Times

Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator, The Times

Lara Spirit, deputy political editor, The Sunday Times

Producers: Euan Dawtrey, Harry Kitson

Executive producer: Molly Guinness

Picture: Henry Nowak with his father, Mark (Family handout/PA)

Audio: PA, ITV

This podcast was brought to you thanks to subscribers of The Times and The Sunday Times. To enjoy unlimited digital access to all our journalism subscribe here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Back in Downing Street, Rachel Reeves is machine-gunning her colleagues. The question is whether she genuinely believes she can survive in post under an Andy Burnham leadership.

Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator, The Times

Lara Spirit, deputy political editor, The Sunday Times

Producers: Euan Dawtrey, Harry Kitson

Executive producer: Molly Guinness

Picture credit: Getty Images

This podcast was brought to you thanks to subscribers of The Times and The Sunday Times. To enjoy unlimited digital access to all our journalism subscribe here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Steven Swinford, political editor, The Times

Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator, The Times

Lara Spirit, deputy political editor, The Sunday Times

Producers: Euan Dawtrey, Harry Kitson

Executive producer: Molly Guinness

Picture credit: Getty Images

This podcast was brought to you thanks to subscribers of The Times and The Sunday Times. To enjoy unlimited digital access to all our journalism subscribe here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.