A removal van has already been spotted outside Downing Street. Sir Keir Starmer and his family will leave on Monday morning. And Andy Burnham, the man Starmer barred from standing as a Labour parliamentary candidate as recently as January, will walk in.
It is a weekend of frenzied finalising for the incoming prime minister. Burnham, officially declared Labour leader on Friday, has spent the past few days in access talks with the civil service, planning a blitz of appearances and announcements for his opening days in office. National security briefings have begun. The handover of power has stepped up a gear.
“Andy Burnham becomes PM Monday after being barred from standing for Labour as recently as January.”
“16 years we’ve been thinking about this, and it’s still felt like a rush in the last few weeks,” admitted one supporter. The rush is understandable: Burnham’s path to this moment was slow for a long time, then suddenly very fast. He first made his ambitions explicit in 2010, after Labour’s defeat, contesting the vacancy left by Gordon Brown. He ran again in 2015, and lost both times – to Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn, each of whom went on to lose general elections. Third time, in 2026, proved lucky.
Yet as recently as January, Starmer barred him from standing for a parliamentary seat. Now Starmer is packing his bags. No one formally challenged him for the leadership; once he resigned, no one took on Burnham. The process that could have been drawn out was not, leaving Team Burnham scrambling to prepare.
“I haven’t made any decisions yet about who will be in that top team,” Burnham claimed as he became leader, in what the BBC called an ear-catchingly absolute phrase. Later, pressed, he said he was “finalising those decisions”. This weekend is for that finalising. The question of who will be chancellor dominates, but there are 149 ministerial posts held by 122 people to fill, according to the Institute for Government.
Lucy Powell, Labour’s deputy leader, said simply: “He’s got big ideas.” Burnham himself, at a special conference in London on Friday, insisted “I have a plan” to give people “hope back”. The next prime minister has also begun to receive national security briefings.
The speed of his rise has left even his own team racing to catch up. Monday will mark the culmination of a 16-year journey that nearly didn’t happen at all.
