Andy Burnham is a coward

The Emperor Nero and Keir Starmer may not have a lot in common, though both were guilty of fiddling while their countries burned. But in AD 68, Nero was dead, and Rome began getting through emperors at a rate that would impress even modern Britain. Servius Sulpicius Galba, the elderly governor of Hispania, had been spoken of as imperial material for decades.

He marched on Rome, was acclaimed by a Senate that saw no alternative, and lasted seven whole months, before the Praetorians cut him down in the Forum. Tacitus’ epitaph for Galba has become famous: 

Capax imperii nisi imperasset.

Capable of ruling. Until he ruled.

British politics has been doing its best to emulate this tumultuous period of history recently. We are about to have  our sixth prime minister in seven years. Andy Burnham will be declared leader unopposed: nominated by 322 MPs. None of the landslide crop of 2024 were deemed capable, of course. No leadership contest, no membership ballot, no general election. A safe seat was vacated for him in Makerfield, its sitting MP falling on his sword (the real Praetorian guard would never!).

How has the emperor-designate prepared the nation for his reign? By declining, for a fortnight, to answer a single question from a journalist, then, on the eve of his coronation, granting an audience to Gary Lineker. Robert Jenrick put it best: Burnham “has broken his two-week silence in a hard-hitting interview with… Gary Lineker”. 

The conversation, posted to Lineker’s Goalhanger YouTube channel on Wednesday, ranged across the great matters of state: England’s World Cup semi-final against Argentina, silence from the guest as the host described Gaza as “genocide”, and, almost as an afterthought, whether the incoming prime minister of a stagnant, overtaxed country intends to raise taxes further.

Perhaps Burnham found inspiration, or a kindred spirit, in the crisp salesman. Lineker went sixteen years as a professional without a single booking, a record built on never attempting a tackle. Burnham is now about to become prime minister without facing a proper press interview.

There was one proper policy question, at least, about wealth taxes. The idea was recently demolished, inadvertently, by non-economist Gary Stevenson, whose Channel 4 documentary was designed to make audiences sympathetic to it (even the Guardian branded it an “embarrassment”, and Christopher Snowdon completed the demolition in these pages). 

But when Burnham was asked about this comprehensively discredited idea, he said:

“I’m not going to rule things out right now. I do believe we need a greater sense of fairness and people feeling that things are being done in the right way and a fair way.”

That decision, he explained, was “for another day”. First he would need to “properly look at the state of things”. This is not the answer that someone who is fit to lead the world’s fifth-biggest economy should give. I need not expound on the state of the UK’s finances, but it would take a rare talent to conclude that driving away investment now is a good move.

The closest the public gets to knowing what punishment beatings we are about to endure comes from leaks from the self-declared Burnham inner circle. In response to a growing number of leaked ideas, Reform UK have totted up a £38 billion programme of extra taxation. This includes a “care levy” of up to ten per cent of estates at death, capital gains tax “reform”, and National Insurance on landlords’ rental income, stacked atop the £66 billion Labour has already extracted in its two years in office.

Mainstream, the think tank founded to give “Burnhamism” an intellectual patina, costed the death levy alone at £14 billion, and conceded it would cause even more rich people to leave. Burnham himself, in more carefree days when his word wouldn’t move gilt yields, championed a 50p top rate and still will not rule out taxing capital gains as income.

This is all, obviously, economically illiterate and will be ruinously damaging. But beyond that, planning to implement such swingeing pain, while refusing to say so, on the eve of office, is a special kind of political cowardice. It is an impulse of politicians who want to hurt their political enemies, and those enemies’ voters, but don’t even have the guts to admit it.

Worse is the faux-chillaxed, centrist-dad shrug at any suggestion that he should have to face real scrutiny at all

None of this should surprise, even if it is still quietly shocking to see. Andy Burnham’s career is a masterclass in cowardice; arriving after the battle and saluting the winning colours. He was a Blairite while Blair won, and a Brownite as Brown rose. He twice ran for the Labour leadership and failed, contriving in 2015 to start as favourite and, through sheer haplessness, to inflict Jeremy Corbyn on the world. In the process, he abstained on a vote on the welfare bill he claimed to oppose.

Rather than fight Corbynism, he pronounced Westminster broken and flounced off to Manchester, perfecting there the art of power without responsibility. He became  “King in the North” but his budgets were set, and his failures were underwritten, by the Treasury whose bankruptcy he now plots. Even his celebrated “defiance” of the government during Covid in 2020 came with the cameras rolling and the crowd already cheering: a pantomime performance in which he turned down £60 million while holding out for £65 million, then declared a “winter of hardship”. He has never once been brave.

So the refusal to face the press is perfectly fitting for this consummate empty suit (Armani, of course. An awkward fact extracted and admitted to after first criticising other politicians for wearing nice suits). 

The stupidity of this is that whilst it will get him into No 10, it does so with no real plan, no stress-tested ideas, no ideas worthy of the name at all. This is the same thing that happened to Starmer and Reeves two years ago. Compared to Burnham, they look like philosopher-kings.

Incapable of rule, Galba was quickly killed off by the same people who had installed him. He had, at least, commanded legions. Andy Burnham cannot even face questions from journalists. He is a coward and will prove a disaster. Perhaps there is a warning in Galba’s final words, as supporters of the usurper Otho torn down his flag, threw him from the chair in the forum and approached him, swords drawn:

Ferirent si ita e republica videretur.

Strike, if it be for the Romans’ good.

Tacitus tells us “Little did the murderers care what he said.”