ANDY Burnham is auditioning to replace Keir Starmer as First Algorithm to the Treasury, a job which no sane person should want and every politician longs for. In service of this strange ambition, he is going to give up the Manchester mayoralty and re-enter the Commons after finding a safe Labour seat.
He is confident that such a thing exists, despite all evidence to the contrary. Bless him. You have to suspect that whenever Andy is punched in the mouth, he still puts the tooth under the pillow, and that he gets excited when Christmas is only 23 big sleeps away.
I’d have wagered you’re more likely to find the elusive Moss Side Unicorn than a safe Labour seat, but we are told that Burnham has worked miracles in Manchester so maybe he’s done just that and the pursuit and capture of that whale safe Labour seat is small beer by comparison.
I don’t know what the voters of Manchester feel about being dumped like this. Although to be fair, he’s been Mayor since 2017 so a break-up now wouldn’t be too egregious. A bit of ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ with a smattering of ‘we’ve gone as far as we can together’ to the tune of Don’t Look Back In Anger and it’ll be fine. Andy will be released from his obligation, and Greater Manchester can briefly lick its wounds and ‘move on’ via Tinder.
It was said by some
The selectively puritanical Hannah Spencer, who seems to want you to put down your pint glass and pick up a crack pipe, was always going to win that seat for the Greens, now that Labour’s sectarian electoral game plan has been turned against it.
As usual Starmer got this wrong and did the rest of us a disservice. The public humiliation of the insufferably smug is one of the few pleasures yet to be taxed. Had the PM let things take their course he’d have neutralised the Burnham threat and given the rest of us a good laugh. Perhaps that latter possibility horrified him, his attitude to laughter being possibly as severe as that of Jorge, the blind monk and murderous censor of all things comedic in The Name of the Rose.
It’s all a bit depressing though, this anti-historical mindset which assumes that all events are within the control of the relevant expert class, and that neither God nor chance have any say in the matter. And what is Burnham saying to local Labour canvassers who have natural affection for the traditions, services and quirks of the places where they happen to live?
Burnham likes to play the Northern card, but when it comes to his own advancement, he is one more career politician, for whom constituency and mayoral seats are just transactional, fungible units of currency in the seedy economy of internal Labour machine politics.
I’m not saying the Tories are any better, but when it came to questions of who the leader should be they at least used to have an impeccable system, one which exploited the twin merits of aristocracy and senility. Tory leaders way back when would just ‘emerge’ mysteriously in a way which showed no concern for something as vulgar as process. Nobody could say quite how this toff rather than that one had emerged as Prime Minister and it was not always clear that this emergee even knew they were now in charge of the country.
Seems to me that these were better times. Except for the Suez thing of course. Then the Party ‘modernised’, introduced a voting system and the result was Ted Heath. Enough said.
Speaking of toffs, the Burnham plan reminds me of the Dennis Price character in Kind Hearts and Coronets, who out of a sense of entitlement plots and murders his way almost to a baronetcy, only to be up-ended by an unnecessary exercise in personal vanity.
Hilarious and preposterous in equal measure. As was the film.
