The day after Andy Burnham was officially named as the new Labour leader, a political party still nursing its wounds from a decade of online warfare tried to pretend the past five minutes never happened. But old tweets have a way of catching up.
Channel 4 News spoke to three Labour MPs from different wings of the party about whether Burnham can hold it together. Rachael Maskell, on the left, backed him and wants to see Ed Miliband as Chancellor. Graham Stringer, a former Manchester City Council leader and minister under Tony Blair, offered his perspective. Marie Tidball, who has known Burnham since 2012 through shared work on disability rights and became an MP two years ago, also spoke.
“Andy Burnham named Labour leader as old tweets expose party's insult culture, challenging unity.”
The challenge is immense. Just hours earlier, at Keir Starmer’s final PMQs on Wednesday, Kemi Badenoch had delivered a warm, twinkly-eyed tribute to the outgoing leader. Starmer was magnanimous about her past hard tackles, saying “it has to be robust — that is the way politics is done”. But the tone masks a deeper fracture.
This week, old tweets from Labour MPs emerged insulting Ann Widdecombe. David Lammy wrote in 2019 that she was “absolutely poisonous” and a “bigot”; Jess Phillips in 2010 urged readers to vote the “little fascist beast” off Strictly. As Lammy paid solemn homage to Widdecombe after last week’s horrific events — the nature of which was not specified — his words rang hollow. The UnHerd article noted: “It is sometimes useful to have one or two disinhibited voices around to harness voter fury.”
Meanwhile, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson – branded a “spiteful class warrior” by Badenoch during the same PMQs session – has been making political capital out of the label, even posing with the phrase on a t-shirt. The article also recalled that when Badenoch recently spoke of “400 knives stuck in [Starmer’s] back”, some Labour MPs suggested it might be an incitement to violence — a point the article called unconvincing.
Burnham now inherits a party where insults are both a weapon and a wound. Can he unite it? The MPs who spoke to Channel 4 did not offer a clear answer. But the question hangs over his leadership from the very start.
