Event: Andy Burnham

Anthony Albanese channelled Paul Keating as he spoke to government MPs in Canberra this week, reflecting on the tough work of reform.Keating, Albanese said, considered Labor to be a bit like a bicycle. “It only stands up when you pedal,” the party grandee once warned, suggesting that without ideas, direction or momentum, the whole show falls over.Less than 24 hours earlier, Albanese had lamented the fate of his friend Keir Starmer, for whom things had truly fallen over.On Monday night, Australian time, the British prime minister confirmed he would resign, less than two years on from a landslide election victory.Starmer – the foreign leader with whom Albanese has most closely aligned himself – was the victim of the “harsh business” of politics, Albanese said, with former Manchester mayor Andy Burnham expected to be living at 10 Downing Street within weeks.Albanese and Starmer had cooperated and collaborated, sharing policy ideas and messaging, even offering themselves up as the vanguard of progressive middle powers prepared to stand up to Donald Trump.Visiting Liverpool last September, Albanese addressed the Labour conference, defending Starmer’s struggling leadership. He reminded nervous party members that leaders needed time to see their ambitions become reality.But Albanese’s position is fundamentally different to Starmer’s, and his political fortunes are likely to be very different too.Albanese is first and foremost a parliamentarian. He has decades of experience in politics and became prime minister after more than 25 years in Canberra.Starmer, by contrast, entered Westminster a decade ago, after a career as a barrister and director of public prosecutions. Some colleagues accused him of showing contempt for politics and compromising too much on Labour’s values.Since becoming opposition leader in 2019, Albanese’s backers say he has proved himself a skilled manager, maintaining strong relationships across the caucus. Like Starmer, Albanese has a big backbench…

The Tory leader gave this terrible government exactly what it deserves – a sharp kicking. It wasn’t that long ago when the Westminster cognoscenti would assure us that Tory leader Kemi Badenoch was weak and inept. ‘Kemi Badenoch isn’t working’, declared Labour’s in-house magazine, the New Statesman, just last summer. The article quoted critics who described her as ‘fragile’ and ‘frightened’, an opposition leader who seemed incapable of holding Keir Starmer’s Labour government to account. What a difference a year makes. Having once mocked her for being fragile and inept, Labour is now complaining Prime Minister’s Questions this week. And much of the press seems to agree. The pearl-clutching response is mainly due to Badenoch’s criticisms of education secretary Bridget Phillipson and energy secretary Ed Miliband. Citing a poll by the National Education Union that found ‘zero per cent’ of its members believe Phillipson is doing a good job, Badenoch said, ‘It turns out appointing a spiteful class warrior as education secretary was a disaster’. Before she turned her guns on the education secretary, Badenoch had some fun with Miliband. ‘When the going got tough, he jumped into bed with the mayor of Manchester [Andy Burnham]. It’s not the first time he’s betrayed someone close to him, is it?’, joked Badenoch, referencing Ed beating his brother, David, in the 2010 Labour leadership contest. All of this was met with howls of dismay from the Labour Party. Starmer, apparently reprogrammed after Monday’s malfunction (close listeners to his resignation speech insist there was a brief lump in his throat), delivered a predictably robotic defense of his ministers and his premiership. Manufactured cheers broke out on the backbenches. To which Badenoch said: ‘I’ve never seen this much excitement on the Labour benches, cheering so loudly while there are 400 knives in his back.’…

For obvious reasons, and despite a hailstorm of speculation, we have yet to see any solid policy changes guaranteed from Andy Burnham’s team, and pundits are still in the personality-assessment stage of the recruiting process. Happily, this is where I feel most able to contribute. I suppose I might be in a bubble, but I have yet to see anyone outside of the Parliamentary Labour Party suggest that once the clouds of glory have dissipated over Euston Station, the UK’s next prime minister will be anything other than a tremendous disappointment. Actually, that’s not quite correct. Some people expect so little that disappointment would be impossible, but you get my drift. This might be to underestimate the threat that Burnham represents. If he does institute radical changes to the tax code, make Britain an even more hostile environment for the ambitious, wealthy, aspirational or merely talented and hardworking, and double down on all the worst parts of the past two years (Net Zero in particular), then he could do far more damage than is evoked by mere disappointment. In the meantime, it’s useful to settle on a reliable mental model for what is going on right now. We need a decent analogy for the regicide and coronation that we are witnessing. Here, I offer up half a dozen analogies prêt-à-porter – parables that I have not seen overused just yet, should you want to impress colleagues or, if WFH, the dog. Perhaps most popular is Burnham as ‘the King over the Water’, a reference to the exiled Stuart claimants to the English throne. It works even if the water is the Manchester Shipping Canal. It certainly harnesses the sturdy romantic conviction of the Jacobites and the British myth of the great lost cause. More prosaic perhaps, but still convincing, is…

Millions of low-skilled migrants may soon be allowed to settle permanently and access the welfare state. The Makerfield by-election was seen as one of the most consequential in modern British history and, with reports that Andy Burnham intends to scrap planned reforms to Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR), it is hard to argue otherwise. The result last Thursday will not only give the UK a new prime minister, but could also mean up to 2.15million migrants who arrived between 2021 and the election of Keir Starmer – known as the ‘Boriswave’ – will soon be awarded permanent settlement, putting them on a pathway to British citizenship. A politician with a mandate of just under 25,000 votes is taking our country down a path that will have profound social, fiscal and democratic consequences. Last year, home secretary Shabana Mahmood introduced modest proposals that would require care workers and their dependents who arrived during Johnson’s term to wait up to 15 years before obtaining ILR, with the baseline for other migrants increasing from five to 10 years. It was a long-overdue recognition that the last Conservative government’s immigration policies had led to an unprecedented spike in low-wage and low-skill migration. Standing in a Red Wall seat, Burnham softly indicated that he supported the general gist of Mahmood’s plan. He also u-turned on his prior support for migrants to have immediate access to public funds on arrival, and said net migration needed to continue falling. For an individual vying for the top job, this made perfect sense. Polling by More in Common found that 52 per cent of voters think the main reason immigrants come to the UK is to take advantage of welfare and the NHS. The vast majority of the British public do not support giving welfare to migrants. Enjoying spiked?…