Nothing stays fresh for long in parliament and no one sounds normal. The air, thick with convention, suffocates originality, tuning every voice to the same Westminster pitch. The need to escape that climate is one reason why Andy Burnham quit his Commons seat to run for mayor of Greater Manchester.
Or that is how he tells the story. Returning after nearly a decade away, the prime minister says he wants to throw open the windows, let in some air. He thinks devolution can cultivate a healthier political culture.
He intends to rebalance England’s centre of gravity with a power base in the new No 10 North. The timing of Burnham’s arrival in Downing Street, just before the summer recess, suited those arguments. He replaced Keir Starmer, then promptly went on tour, posting chatty videos on social media, appearing as the antidote to a stuffy predecessor who, perhaps unfairly, had come to be seen as the archetypal Westminster mechanoid.
Starmer, who today announced his intention to stand down as an MP, may find his authentic voice on the outside. Meanwhile, Burnham has to bring his free-range prime minister act into the battery farm of the Commons. His mandate and legislative programme are inherited from the Starmer era.
He is stuck with the same squeezed budgets in the same sluggish economy imperilled by the same turbulent global climate. His room for fiscal manoeuvre is constrained by Labour’s 2024 manifesto prohibition on broad-based tax rises and by the bond market’s punitive vigilance towards anything that looks like undisciplined spending. In such conditions, politics is reduced to a zero-sum competition for scarce resources.
Every promise made to satisfy the needs of one department or constituency contains an undeclared threat to deprive someone else. Starmer’s leadership was ruined by many things, but few were as crippling as his failure to grapple with those dilemmas. He wouldn’t pick sides between irreconcilable demands within his cabinet.
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