Keir Starmer’s premiership ended not with a bang but a whimper. The Prime Minister’s voice dropped as he promised to be a better husband and father, and Labour’s machinery immediately began turning towards its next leader: Andy Burnham.
The former Blairite health secretary, who has long been seen as the party’s natural champion, is now hegemonic within Labour’s structures. MPs from warring factions have kissed the ring and crowded for selfies, finding themselves in strange, unprecedented agreement. “Andy is their last hope,” according to one observer, with the soft-Left, hard-Left and Blue Labourites jostling behind an inchoate vision of “the productive state” and other vague Labour principles.
“Andy Burnham is urged to call a snap election after Keir Starmer's resignation, as Labour MPs rally behind him as their last hope.”
But Burnham must soon govern the country, not just his party, and the pressures of No. 10 are of an entirely different order of magnitude. The inheritance is unenviable: a once-in-a-century fragmentation of the two-party system, smartphones cheerily obliterating collective sense of reality, two decades of wage repression, a collapsing public realm, and international gilt traders circling like sharks.
Which is why, commentators argue, Burnham should call an early election. His strengths lie not in his policy platform – described as a confused set of woolly principles – but in his charisma, both within Labour and among the public. He should exploit that during his Mr Labour honeymoon period, while he is still the unassailable king, before the cultural-political projections of his putative “Manchesterism” are sullied by time and close reading.
A snap election would allow Burnham to hew close to the image the public holds of him, with a manifesto stuffed with radical constitutional reforms: replacing the House of Lords with an elected Senate of the Regions, maximum devolution to municipalities and city-regions, and proportional representation for the Commons. That would lock in centre-left coalition governance for a generation.
Labour’s existing record of incremental leftward shifts could be repackaged as the start of a genuine project of national renewal: nationalised rail, a public energy firm, a sovereign wealth fund, and a higher minimum wage. Whether Burnham can survive beyond 2029 may depend on seizing the moment now, while his aura remains untarnished.