The coming months will show whether Andy Burnham fits Kemi Badenoch’s charge of a leader too obsessed with being liked to make hard choices. One thing, however, does seem clear from his first outing at prime minister’s questions: he likes saying yes. The very first question came from a political opponent – Ann Davies of Plaid Cymru – but Burnham replied as if she was a valued constituent, saying he understood her worries about the prison early release scheme and hoped she could be reassured.
By the session’s close, Burnham had responded patiently to MPs from virtually all benches of the Commons, even Reform UK, and committed to a series of in-person meetings, some for himself, others for colleagues. Bonhomie is a necessarily limited political resource, even for new prime ministers who have promised to, as Burnham put it, focus on “problem solving rather than point scoring”. And thus it was that by Badenoch’s third question, Burnham was blaming the economic legacy of previous Conservative governments.
By the fourth, he was bringing up Liz Truss’s mini-budget, a near-weekly feature of Keir Starmer’s PMQs repertoire. In fairness, the latter was something of a political open goal given Badenoch’s decision to, in a weekend reshuffle of her shadow cabinet, give the top Treasury post to Andrew Griffith, who worked closely on and then stoutly defended Truss’s 2022 fiscal debacle. What did this 45 minutes of studied empathy, mixed in with a few above-the-knee tackles, tell us?
As is generally the case with the PMQs, not much in the way of definitive lessons, but it gave several interesting pointers. PMQs is a hard skill to learn, even for someone like Burnham who spent over a decade in frontbench posts during his last period in parliament, and he is unlikely to sound as tentative again. Equally, facing a brand new opponent, Badenoch was obliged to test out a few areas of attack, seeing which might stick.
The bulk of these were based on a pre-existing Badenoch narrative that Burnham is perfectly nice, but a people-pleaser, a “spendthrift prime minister who wants to say yes to everyone”, as she put it on Wednesday. Burnham did push back at times, insisting his early-weeks giveaways were fully costed and stressing the importance of fiscal discipline. But more often he simply ignored the attacks, setting out a pledge – dismissed by Badenoch as mere “vibes” – to restore the nation’s “sense of positivity, a sense of possibility”.
When it comes assessing PMQs performances, there are two linked caveats, the first of which is that this is primarily a terrain for the pros and the geeks. Few beyond MPs, the media and political fans notice the weekly spectacle beyond a 20-second clip which might crop up in their social media feed. The follow-on is that even doing well at PMQs brings limited benefits, beyond cheering up the faithful.
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