ANDY Burnham. The man a significant faction of the Labour Party look at as some kind of Promised True King, who is apparently prophesied to Save Labour. It’s a really remarkable concept on several levels.
The idea that Andy Burnham drives the people of the North into a frenzy of devotion because he’s a real-life Jon Snow figure (the ‘King of the North’ in Game of Thrones) is the definition of weird. Burnham has the dourness of Gordon Brown and the roboticism of Keir Starmer. He’s virtually the same cardboard person, with exactly the same views, held with even more unthinking dullness.
This cohort of the Labour Party who think he will be their saviour are very like the Tories who were sure that Rishi Sunak would transform the failing fortunes of the Conservatives. The belief is simply another symptom of a gigantic disconnect from reality and from what ordinary people are thinking and feeling.
If you can find me an ordinary, real, not already politically connected person, who will suddenly vote Labour if Andy Burnham is the leader, I’ll say you’ve found a liar. No normal person walks around in an ‘I Heart Andy Burnham’ T-shirt. And yet Labour MPs apparently do, so much so that one of them, Josh Simon (one is tempted to add Simple as a middle name) was prepared to step down from the seat of Makerfield to trigger a by-election purely to provide a route for the King-in-Waiting to contest the Labour Party leadership.
There’s something astonishingly feudal about modern progressive socialism. This is literally a case of a vassal knight sacrificing himself for the King Who Must Be. What’s the motivation for it? Is it that the position of the party is so dire that sacrificing a seat seems like the only option for recovery? But if that’s the case, why on earth does Simon think recovery can come only from Andy the Chosen One?
It’s not as if Simon is alone in this assessment. There’s an entire Burnham faction calling for the True King to be swiftly installed. And there are two glaring issues with this.
The first is the bizarre nature of the assessment, when one looks at the object of their devotion. When the Tory Party was engaged in similar self-destructive Game of Thrones manoeuvres, there was at least a period where a clear demarcation seemed to exist not just between potential candidates as personalities, but also a real conceptual battle over policy. Before the disaster of Boris in power, there was some truth to the idea that Boris was different. His personality was markedly larger and more unique (a ‘unique selling point’ as marketeers might say) compared with the standard late Tory offering. There was something of the Jolly Bad Boy about the priapic Boris, an anarchic suggestion that, if frailties were very evidently there, at least these frailties were human ones, like a political Falstaff unexpectedly plonked into the 21st century. And there was Brexit too, before the May-style deal and the non-delivery and the shoddy compromises shamefully unresisted.
But with Burnham, there’s never been a hint of an ability to appeal outside the Labour vote equal to the early Boris appeal outside the Tory vote. Burnham crusaders point to what they declare is the highest approval rating for any current leading politician – but they don’t tell you that this ‘high’ is still pretty much a low. While 34 per cent of people approve of Burnham, 30 per cent disapprove of him. A plus-4 per cent rating is not the Promised King Beloved by All level they pretend. It looks good only because the rest of his party and the current PM are almost universally despised. And what is Burnham’s position? He’s an arch-Remainer with exactly the same Brexit-betraying views as Starmer, expressed a bit less slyly.
As Mayor of Greater Manchester, Burnham hasn’t been linked directly with the last two years of despised rule except by party affiliation. He’s been isolated from the general collapse. That insulation disappears as soon as he moves again from the Manchester stage to the national one.
As with Wes Sweeting, Angela Rayner and other potential leadership contest contenders, it’s hard to think of any way the King in the North really differs from Starmer. He’s the same plodding, uninspiring, turgid, unimaginative quintessence of modern Labour, and modern British, metropolitan conformity.
The sense one gets from this entire class is that they are rules-oriented, process-driven, utterly unimaginative jobsworths, the kind of people who would write you out a parking ticket while you were having a heart attack. Even the most radical things they believe and enact, which are very far left, are at the same time standard middle-class assumptions and prejudices.
The whole problem here is that the Labour Party, and all its leadership contenders, represent a faction devoted to power rather than a set of real ideas and principles. Green ideas may be insane, but they are sincerely insane. Reform ability to deliver on populist ideas may be untested, but they are very clear and very real expressions of widely held views on immigration, identity, borders and patriotism, no matter how much those ideas revolt the left-leaning British Establishment and segments of the middle class. But what do Labour represent, what is Keir Starmer about or Andy Burnham about? They are very much not the party of the working class any more, because they keep telling the working class that they are vile, disgusting and hateful extremists, that they are far right. They are Remain fanatics more and more obviously reversing Brexit, and this is part of the general sense of acting as if they own people and can do whatever they please.
Imagine how disconnected you must be, to have seen and exploited the Tory factionalism and internal conflict and the Tory refusal to listen and change unpopular policies after 14 years of failing to improve anything, and then responding by doing the exact same things within just two years. Only with prison sentences too.
If Andy does seize the crown, it will tarnish just as quickly as it did on Starmer’s head. Both men came from the Labour Together factional group (Starmer openly, Burnham now more secretly). Both are Fabian Society members. Both are schooled in Machine politics. Both are Europhiles who despise Brexit. Both have offered surface loyalty and behind the scenes factional struggle to remove prior leaders. Both are deeply uncharismatic. And both are propelled forward by groups exactly the same as themselves. Labour Together boasted about their influence. Morgan McSweeney of course led that group before becoming Starmer’s Chief of Staff, a post he recently had to resign as a fall guy for the Mandelson appointment. Over half the current Cabinet are Fabians.
Several key figures are from the Lambeth Machine or from Labour Together, including David Lammy (Deputy PM and Justice Secretary) Shabana Mahmood (Home Secretary), Steve Reed (Housing Secretary), John Healey (Defence Secretary) and Lisa Nandy (Culture Secretary). Labour Together have rebranded themselves as Think Labour after it was proved that they broke the law at least 20 times regarding dubious funding practices. The group took in very large donations, and distributed funding to more than 100 Labour MPs. They also concocted Russian collusion-type smears against journalists and political opponents. In these practices they acted like a British Poundshop version of the kind of forces that supported US Democrat dark arts.
And the King in the North? Neck-deep in the same groups, despite claims to the contrary. The MP who has stepped down for Burnham, Josh Simon? He is another previous leader of Labour Together and a close ally of Shabana Mahmood. If Burnham wins, it will have been in part handed to him by the same shadowy cabal that engineered Starmer’s victory. Suddenly Simon’s quixotic decision makes more sense.
Who doesn’t get a say in any of this, who is not even considered in these schemes and deliberations? Well, the Labour voter, and even less the non-Labour or former Labour voters. You’ll get the King you’re given.
All this means that The True King isn’t riding to the rescue. My guess is that he’ll make more cruel and desperate sacrifices of the innocent, and more stubborn and weak wrong calls, and fall in a battle that’s only a footnote.
