It ended not with a bang but a whimper. Keir Starmer, promising to be a better husband and father, stepped aside — and into the vacuum stepped Andy Burnham. The former Blairite health secretary, who grasped his party and its idiosyncrasies instinctively, now commands a Labour Party that has united around him. "Andy is their last hope," say MPs who have queued for selfies with the man now hegemonic in Labour's structures.
But Burnham must soon govern the country, not just his party. And the inheritance is unenviable. Two decades of wage repression, a collapsing public realm, rising tax and debt burdens. International gilt traders circle as the two-party system fragments in a way unseen for a century. "Smartphones cheerily obliterate our collective sense of what reality even means," one analysis notes. The pressures of No 10 are of an entirely different order of magnitude to city-regional governance or the NHS.
“Andy Burnham should call an early election to survive beyond 2029, says analysis, as Labour unites behind him.”
Which is why, the argument goes, Burnham should call an early election — before the honeymoon ends. His strength is not a policy platform dismissed as a "confused set of woolly principles", but his charisma. To survive beyond 2029, he should exploit that while he remains unassailable, before time and close reading sully the "Manchesterism" projected onto him.
The proposed manifesto would be stuffed with radical constitutional reforms: replacing the House of Lords with an elected Senate of the Regions; maximum devolution to municipalities and city-regions; proportional representation for the Commons. The latter would lock in centre-left coalition governance for a generation. Labour's existing incremental shifts could be repackaged as the start of a genuine project of national renewal: nationalised rail, a public energy firm, a sovereign wealth fund, a higher minimum wage.
Burnham has the power to call that snap election. Whether he does — and whether he can translate charisma into a transformative mandate — remains the open question of British politics.