Election Night

Has there ever been a more blindingly obvious example of the grass is greener syndrome than the sudden hysteria surrounding Andy Burnham? He lost to Ed Miliband in 2010. He was thrashed by Jeremy Corbyn in 2015. Now he’s capped bus fares in Manchester and he’s seen as the all-conquering, returning hero and the saviour of Labour and the country?

Next time you have an issue, call me. You don’t need to go telling tales and consuming officer time with tittle-tattle

EXCL: NEC officers have voted by a majority to let Andy Burnham stand in the Makerfield by-election. Unclear if a meeting was held in the end - there were conflicting reports this morning and sources told me earlier there was nothing in the diary - but a vote has been taken and Burnham will be allowed to stand as the candidate.

My prediction for the next General Election: 🌹LAB: 30% | 340 seats 🌳CON: 25% | 179 🔶LDM: 13% | 65 ➡️RFM: 15% | 8 🌍GRN: 12% | 7 🎗️SNP: 30% (in Scotland) | 16 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿PC: 26% (in Wales) | 10 ⚪️NI Parties: 18 ⚪️OTH: 7

I back Andy Burnham as a prime ministerial candidate. Don’t agree with some of his past actions but he’s our most popular politician and has a rare positive rating. He’s a solid communicator, he supports PR, his vision is broadly progressive and he could see off Farage. Do it.

The consensus at the top of the Labour Party appears to be that Keir Starmer won’t announce a timetable for his departure until Andy Burnham fights the Makerfield by-election. But that makes very little sense to me. Because, as I said on ITV’s News at Ten, the probability he can survive as PM, even if Burnham were to lose the by-election is low. This is what his cabinet colleagues and trade union leaders have made clear to him (and to me). So the timing and manner of his exit are now at the mercy of events, which makes him a lame duck prime minister - whose utterances about policy will barely be heard above the racket of speculation about how and when he will go. This would be humiliating for any PM, but perhaps doubly so for Starmer given that his genuine success in taking Labour to a landslide victory after the nadir of the 2019 election would risk being forgotten and ignored if his last weeks in office are spectacularly chaotic. The limitations on his power are already conspicuous. As his closest colleagues tell me, he was only powerful enough to do the most limited and unambitious of reshuffles to fill the vacancy at health created by Wes Streeting’s resignation - although the disaster of last week’s elections would have been the trigger for a more comprehensive reshaping of the Cabinet if the PM were stronger. Starmer lacks the authority to force any of his ministers to move or leave the government. It’s telling that the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood kept her job even after her allies briefed she told the PM his time is up, and that Streeting dictated the timing of his own resignation, even though his enforcers were actively briefing against the PM. In the Cabinet, the prime minister is supposed to be the first among equals. In Starmer’s case, scrap “the first” and maybe insert “second”. Also, resignations and sackings have over months left his Downing Street team depleted. As even his friends tell me, few want to take a career risk by working for him, partly because of the open secret that he won’t be in post much longer (and partly because the Whitehall zeitgeist is that he is the worst kind of delegator, one who insists on delegating but then shows little loyalty or understanding when things go wrong). So what’s the alternative to him being in office but not in power, as it were? Perhaps he should emulate Tony Blair, despite many in his party having repudiated the Blair years. In September 2006, Blair announced he would resign within a year and he stood down the following June. This longer timetable meant Blair wasn’t tainted by the chaos of unexpected immediate elections. And because the election schedule was dictated by him rather than by factors beyond his control, he looked commensurately stronger. He appeared to be the master of events, not the victim. The “will he? won’t he?” about Starmer last week was exhausting just to narrate, as I had to do. Goodness knows how bad it was for the main protagonist, Starmer. To be clear, any PM that says he’s off is weakened by that very pledge. But Starmer might actually have even less authority in today’s limbo, where everyone but he acknowledges the reality that he is a short-dated stock.