ANDY Burnham and the constituency of Makerfield are now officially an item. Let’s hope the naysayers, cynics and jealous gossips who wonder aloud if this couple really have anything in common turn out to be wrong. And that they spend many happy years together. Soulmates becoming so comfortable with each other that they live in companionable silence.
We know that’s not how it is, of course, and that Burnham will now bank the dowry and execute the fastest and most brutal ‘It’s not you, it’s me’in by-election history before setting off to ‘find himself’ some 160 miles south.
There are some analysts who have argued that this will in the end redound to Makerfield’s benefit – that it will be good news for that constituency to have elected an MP who goes on to end the Starmer Terror and take over the tenancy of 10 Downing Street.
I’m not sure I follow this line of reasoning which seems to me like saying that a dumpy newlywed should feel flattered that her husband has perfunctorily consummated the marriage then at once taken a glamorous mistress.
Whatever the consequences of this by-election turn out to be there is no doubt that the outcome is (to use the language du jour) divisive, in that it divides the Prime Minister (who seems to be taking it as some sort of validation) from people who are not insane.
There is good divisive and bad divisive; I think this one registers as divisiveness at its best. Surely nobody will ever listen again to the commentators who thought that this prime minister could be shamed into a resignation by bad local election results?
The question of Starmer’s survival as PM has moved from being about his personal psychology and whether he has one, to simple mathematics as he is moved into a situation where no Cabinet minister will serve under him.
Which is not to say that Burnham will necessarily inherit the premiership. I have written before that his plotting is a bit too Kind Hearts and Coronets for my liking and that, like Dennis Price in that classic comedy noir, he could fall at the last owing to some avoidable act of hubris.
And not all the variables are manageable. Al Carns’s resignation letter https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgjx64yl7z9o went way wider than his brief as a sub-Cabinet defence minister required. Suspiciously so.
Then there’s the fact that this is the Labour Party and that if there is to be a leadership contest there will have to be a female candidate so that the wider membership can pass her over, in the customary socialist way.
Let’s not forget, as well, that God has a sense of humour. Is it too much to hope that it takes the following form: Burnham loses his third leadership contest . . . to Keir Starmer?
There are times when you must point out that the spurned woman sort of brought it on herself. When it dawns on her that Burnham is no longer as taken as he once was by the issue of potholes on the High Street, we have to tell Makerfield that she was warned that this would happen – that his concern for her was always synthetic and transactional.
The by-election has been yet another example of Labour’s indifference to localism. The constituency has become yet another fungible unit of currency in the alternative economy of internal Labour politics. The voters there colluded with that.
But so did nearly everybody else. Not least the commentariat and the political ‘sophisticates’ (I’m looking right at you, Mr Rees-Mogg) who pearl-clutched over whether Restore would ‘split the vote’ on ‘the right’.
This relocation of the ‘fixed pie fallacy’ from economics to psephology is to be expected of the political journalists. It’s disappointing to hear it from the (admittedly vanishingly small) intellectual right, most of which was swept up in the ‘wider narrative’. This, they told us, is the ‘most significant by-election in history’.
Except it isn’t, of course.
Or if it is, so what? We still wake up in a country where young white men can be arrested in the middle of being murdered, even younger white women continue to be victims of tribal rape, and parallel systems of law are speed-assembled in real time.
This is how crazy our politics have become: a sitting prime minister is expected to resign because the party he leads has won an election.
Let that sink in.
