A slow Burnham

“We need to change politics, and we need to do it now!” Andy Burnham announced, to loud applause. Well, we need to do it in three weeks, anyway. Britain is currently in a weird penumbra period. Keir Starmer has resigned as Labour leader and yet continues as prime minister, announcing defence plans and anything else he can push out the door. There is only one candidate to replace him, yet we have to sit through nearly a month of Labour just checking that no one else wants the job. It’s a fitting end to Starmer’s time in office that it involves sticking rigidly to a procedure that serves no purpose.

In the meantime those of us anxious for what the future will hold can pore over Burnham’s speech in Manchester on Monday. The location was a conscious choice: for decades there have been accusations that Britain is too London-centric. Burnham proposes to fix that by making it Manchester-centric, which will be a huge relief to everyone in Newcastle. 

We can already sense that Burnham’s insistence that London is a completely alien place to him, because he’s so gritty and northern, is going to become incredibly wearying

“I’m missing all of you,” he told the people of Manchester, as though he were in the middle of a 10-year mission to the South Pole. We can already sense that Burnham’s insistence that London is a completely alien place to him, because he’s so gritty and northern, is going to become incredibly wearying. He had a report on this strange world, which he delivered like the intrepid explorer he is. “I was worried about what I found on my return last week,” he said. “It is a more fragmented, disjointed place than the one I left.” To be fair, that’s how everyone feels when they go through Euston.

He was, he told us, wearing his “Manchester clothes”, a T-shirt and jacket. These are clothes that no one has heard of in London, where gentlemen wear frock coats and top hats and twirl their moustaches as they contemplate their weekends spent hunting the peasants outside the M25. 

Burnham’s words were heavy on optimism, closing with a promise of “good growth in every postcode and hope in every heart”. Why have these things proved so elusive in the past? Because government is too London, apparently. From now on, there’ll be an emphasis on “places”. High streets will be restored, council houses rebuilt, crooked roads made straight, rough ways made smooth. Defence spending will be judged by how it can support British industry, he said, as though it were a new approach, rather than a continuation of the policy that most recently gave us the Ajax, an armoured vehicle significantly more dangerous to its passengers than to any enemy.

Back in London, that city so alien to Burnham that he needs to don a pith helmet simply to find it on a map, Kemi Badenoch was making the most of his absence, with a speech whose message was, essentially, “just get on with it”. At last, she had a chance to speak for the nation. 

Britain was facing a “summer of chaos” as it changed prime minister, she said, a fair point if somewhat undermined when coming from the leader of a party that delivered a whole decade of madness. The unusual situation of the Tories denies Badenoch several of the tools usually available to an opposition leader at such moments. She cannot, for instance, call for an immediate general election, because the only people who want one of those less than Labour are the Conservatives. (She later denied this, saying cheerfully “you saw the result in Aberdeen South”. Unfortunately, we saw all the results not in Aberdeen South, too.) The result was really a speech demanding Burnham take over sooner.

With his plans still opaque, it was tricky for Badenoch to attack them, so she was vague. We learned that she’s a devolution sceptic, but it’s hardly a surprise that she doesn’t trust distant mayors to run things: she pretty clearly thinks that everyone who isn’t her is an idiot.

Someone asked about her comparison of Bridget Phillipson to a member of the Gestapo. “She’s putting ideology above the welfare of children,” Badenoch explained. “That’s what that reference was about.” It’s not that this is incorrect in its description of what the Gestapo did, but it’s somewhat… incomplete. We were left wondering whether, somehow, Britain hasn’t discussed the Second World War enough. 

But this was a mere amuse-bouche to the comparison that was to come. Why had she compared Ed Miliband to the Nigerian dictatorship? “My childhood was spent in Nigeria. Nigeria is an oil -producing country that never had any electricity,” Badenoch explained. “Why? Because it had bad policies from military dictatorships.” Simplistic, but unarguable. “Ed Miliband is actually doing the same thing.” Killing his opponents and allowing oil companies to drill where they want in return for huge bribes? “He wants more state control.” Oh. Is that the same thing? “Yes, Ed Miliband is acting like the Nigerian military dictators.”

Every now and then, Badenoch will say something — about sandwiches, say — that reminds you she only moved to Britain as a teenager. But then she’ll talk about Nigeria in a way that makes you wonder whether she’s even read a Wikipedia page on the country. Does she really believe that Burnham, with Miliband at his side, is about to usher in an era of fearsome dictatorship, or even that our military is capable of enforcing one? If so, perhaps we ought to be making the most of our three remaining weeks of freedom.