What Burnham can learn from Boris Unite the people, not the party

What was once assumed to be a temporary convulsion in British politics now appears a permanent condition. Nearly a decade after Brexit, the country is fraught with political fragmentation as loyalties collapse and anti-establishment anger swells.

Boris Johnson was the first major politician to successfully harness the chaos. Back in 2019, as the Conservatives faced electoral collapse and the rise of insurgent populism, he posed as a maverick outsider and — despite leading a party that had been in power for almost a decade — turned government into a vehicle for revolt. He went on to win the largest Tory majority since 1987 and Got Brexit Done.

Labour is now facing a moment of similar peril. It has lost Wales and vast swathes of urban Britain, as well as towns and suburbs to Nigel Farage’s Reform. Much like the Tories before Johnson, Labour seems done for; remote and detached from the people it claims to represent.

So, as chaos consumes Westminster, the party is frantically searching for a political redeemer. Wes Streeting, resigning as Health Secretary yesterday, offered a diagnosis: “where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift.” But besides his impressive alliteration, the now former Health Secretary didn’t offer much by way of solutions. Indeed, at the time of writing, no senior MP has mounted a leadership challenge to Starmer. In fact, the party would seem paralysed but for one man: Andy Burnham. And late yesterday, Josh Simons forsook his Makerfield constituency to allow the Manchester Mayor to contest the seat in a by-election which, should he win, will mean he can stand for the leadership.

Burnham probably doesn’t think he has much to learn from the tousle-haired Tory. But if he does win the seat, and later replaces Starmer, he will have to learn what Johnson instinctively understood: to build a coalition strong enough to stop Farage’s populist cavalcade, he must rescue Labour from elements killing it from within.

Starmer has turned Labour into a party of cautious, insipid managers — adding credence to the caricature of centrist politics. Even on Monday, when he had to give the speech of a lifetime, the Prime Minister pledged to nationalise British Steel, but only “pending review”. Those two words sum up everything that has gone wrong during his premiership.

So Labour needs an insurgent — against the status quo yet, like Johnson, from inside the corridors of power. But does Burnham have it in him? To an extent, his uncontentious manner reflects the broader culture of much of Labour. There is a longstanding instinct, particularly on the “soft Left”, to reconcile factions and bring people together.  Gordon Brown, as his premiership took a turn for the worse, memorably welcomed Peter Mandelson back as Business Secretary. A few years later, after upsetting the odds, Ed Miliband offered an olive branch to the Blairites by making Alan Johnson — who later admitted to buying a copy of Economics for Dummies — his shadow Chancellor. Even Blair had Robin Cook, John Prescott and Clare Short.

Recent history suggests there’s not much evidence that such emollience, by itself, is a strategy. Mandelson’s prodigal return didn’t make the slightest difference for Labour in the general election that followed. Picking Alan Johnson, and later Ed Balls, as his shadow chancellors stopped Miliband from crafting a distinctive political brand. And right now, with Labour already in power, Burnham can’t afford to prioritise uniting several hundred MPs over uniting the country. The former, after all, might soon depend on him to save their jobs.

Instead, Burnham must concede that his own party is just as dysfunctional as the Conservatives were, and accept Labour’s shared culpability for decades of bad decisions: from PFI and privatising utilities to the Iraq War; an economic model built on cheap migrant labour and, latterly, trying to thwart Brexit. That, after all, is at the core of Nigel Farage’s message: decades of failure are the result of a rotten consensus, overseen by the uniparty as it squatted in the “centre ground”. This smug dogmatism insulated politicians from the needs and opinions of the public. It’s precisely why the potential Hail Mary presently being pitched by some Starmer supporters, re-joining the EU, will appall so many. And yet, Labour still doesn’t get it.

Burnham, then, must accept the accuracy of Reform’s diagnosis — before outlining his own alternative — a policy platform increasingly known as Manchesterism. At the heart of this agenda is a vision based on sovereignty, common ownership and a productive national economy: themes that aren’t offputting to the majority of Reform voters. It has the feel of a Left-wing, British version of MAGA, a prospectus that could attract a large bloc of voters.

Manchesterism, as detailed in a report this week, identifies the root of Britain’s permanent slide in living standards as the extractive nature of rentierism, be it buy-to-let landlords, private equity or foreign sovereign-wealth funds. Yet besides this critique, which unsurprisingly calls for public ownership of things such as water and energy, is a pro-enterprise agenda embedded in a state that protects. If you have £80,000 of student debt you are less likely to start a business, or begin a family — a self-evident truth somehow lost on the policy wonks of SW1.

In other words, Burnham should attack the prime movers of precarious Britain — from the architects of tuition fees to those who pushed outsourcing into every corner of local government. Successfully selling this platform must therefore be accompanied by upbraiding the likes of the Tony Blair Institute, ditching ID cards and asking questions about the wisdom of various constitutional reforms since 1997. I’m yet to hear a socialist argument for the Supreme Court, or Osborne’s even more idiotic OBR. And while I don’t favour a hereditary system, it’s hard to argue that the “reformed” House of Lords, built on cronyism and party patronage, is any better. For decades, Burnham should say, the Party lost its way. A vital connection with the toiling classes was lost. Implicating a government within which he served — that of Tony Blair — would only serve to underscore the extent of his critique, while blunting attacks from Reform.

Among all the figures currently being discussed as successors to Starmer, Burnham stands apart because he alone appears capable of building a coalition to stop Reform. Wes Streeting is simply the continuity candidate for the uniparty, associated with all those figures the voters distrust. Ed Miliband was rejected by the electorate once before, and would struggle to present himself as a figure of renewal. While Angela Rayner remains the preferred candidate of several trade unions, doubts about her authority within the party persist — and she has seemed increasingly lightweight since Labour entered office. Others floated — such as Al Cairns and Shabana Mahmood — have no hope with the Labour membership. Cairns has only been an MP for two years, and has no policy agenda or base within the party. Meanwhile Mahmood’s tenure as Home Secretary has arguably angered Labour members more than anyone.

Burnham, though, has that rare advantage. He alone among these purported rivals can command support from both his party’s parliamentarians and its members — as well as the general public. Such a convergence matters deeply as the party enters what looks like to be an existential crisis.

To succeed, though, will take more than calling for a new comms strategy, “re-framing” the national debate or nebulous calls for unity. Labour’s most popular national figure will need to convince voters he understands why they have lost trust in the system — and that he has a plan for two decades of decline. This doesn’t mean he should overcook his radical credentials, and spook the bond markets. Rather he must start by conveying a sense of urgency and action, while re-connecting with the constituencies Starmer alienated in recent years — from those who support the cause of a Palestinian state to small business and the Labour Left. At the same time, he could do worse than purge, or at the very least alienate, a few Bluesky liberals. From the start, he’ll need to demonstrate what he’s against.

After all, that’s what Johnson did in 2019, when he dispensed with the pro-European awkward squad — a prologue to turning around the electoral fortunes of a Tory party in meltdown. Like Johnson, Burnham needs to show he’s on the side of the people against the Brahmin elite. What’s more, establishing political consent in the 2020s means governing as an insurgent, a fact that the spin doctors and ideologues of the long Nineties — who generally populate the opinion columns of this country’s broadsheets — are bewildered by. Listen to such voices for much longer, and Labour might well vanish for good.

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