Who is Andy Burnham? It’s something Anglophiles the world over will be asking next week, when the newly elected Labour MP becomes prime minister of the United Kingdom. The trouble is, I’m not sure even Andy Burnham knows the answer to that question.
Burnham is about to become my country’s seventh prime minister in 10 years – a level of churn that is beginning to make Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, which once had a reputation for changing its government more often than some would change their underwear, look like a haven of stability.
But Brits hoping for a fresh start, perhaps even a bit of vision and principle to steer us through these troubled times, are bound to be disappointed. Like Keir Starmer, whose premiership was defined by so many policy u-turns he might as well have been doing donuts, Burnham is the walking, talking embodiment of the Groucho Marx line: “These are my principles. If you don’t like them, well, I have others.”
From across the pond, it might seem like Burnham has come out of nowhere. He has been in the House of Commons representing Makerfield for little more than four weeks. His express intent in running was to topple Starmer and snatch the keys to Downing Street.
In truth, he’s been loitering in the corridors of power for almost three decades. He was first elected to parliament in 2001, serving as a minister under Tony Blair and in the cabinet of Gordon Brown. He made two unsuccessful tilts at the leadership – losing last time around to crusty left-winger Jeremy Corbyn – before he remade himself as mayor of Greater Manchester, where he served for nine years, earning him the obsequious moniker, the King of the North.
Burnham is now trying to veer left – declaring an end to “neoliberalism,” calling for “more public control” of water and energy companies and posturing against Israel. This is the same Burnham who was once at the heart of New Labour’s “centrist” takeover of the party and said, when he last tried to become its leader, that his first foreign visit would be to the Jewish State.
People change their mind, of course, but few do so as swiftly and as frequently as Burnham. The man is a human wind sock. Last year, he said he wanted to rejoin the European Union, sticking two fingers up to the millions of working-class voters who backed Brexit 10 years ago. Now he’s had to walk that back, given that his new constituency voted overwhelmingly for Leave. He blindly supported the trans madness – and the right of men to “identify” their way into the ladies’ bathroom. Now he says he supports last year’s Supreme Court ruling, which secured women’s right to single-sex spaces.
Luckily for Burnham, he is sailing into the top job without any real scrutiny. His margin of victory in this Labour leadership election was almost North Korean. In the end, he stood unopposed – 349 out of the 403 Labour MPs backed him. The mainstream media are fawning over the new Dear Leader to a degree that would make Pravda blush. Burnham has also said he won’t go for an early general election, meaning voters will have an unelected prime minister imposed on them and be denied the opportunity to render a verdict on him.
Had more questions been asked, Burnham’s carefully sculpted image would have already crumbled. He takes credit for the supposed revival of Manchester, defined by a foreign-money-fueled construction boom and a shiny new bus network. But much of this was underway long before he showed up. Meanwhile, he has been slammed for costly, unpopular eco-projects and his perceived failure to tackle the scourge of grooming gangs preying on Manchester’s girls.
Labour and its media henchmen hope Burnham is the man to stop Reform – Nigel Farage’s insurgent populist party that continues to top the polls. On this score, he can hardly be any worse than the adenoidal Starmer – the most unpopular prime minister since records began. Burnham, by contrast, can speak human. He appears to have a pulse. He has cultivated an everyman, “one of the lads” persona, guzzling pints in his trademark T-shirt and jeans.
But a casual-Friday Keir is not going to cut it. The mood in the United Kingdom is restive. Ordinary people are smarting from a stagnant economy and paying the price for our broken borders, rising migrant crime, and fraying social fabric. Even if Burnham wanted to do something about this, his party would never let him. Labour is now the party of posh do-gooders with more moralism than sense. There is already talk of him taking an even softer stance on migration in order to endear him to his MPs, even if that means infuriating the rest of the country.
A lot of Americans have looked across the Atlantic in horror in recent years. The mother country appears to have become a laboratory for all the most demented and authoritarian ideas percolating on the liberal-left. It looks like a place where everything is going to pot and you can be locked up for your tweets. That is only set to continue following the King of the North’s coronation. But just as Americans threw off the yoke of one irksome monarch 250 years ago, here’s hoping it won’t be long before we get a chance to do the same at the ballot box.
Tom Slater is the editor of the British online magazine spiked.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
