Why there will probably be no early election

In Monday’s newsletter, I pondered the sad fate of Andy Burnham, the man doomed to choose between being the next Theresa May or the next Gordon Brown. Either he goes for an early election, when even if he performs well Labour will lose plenty of seats and Reform gain them, narratively crippling his premiership. Or he doesn’t, in which case he’s Bottler Burnham, the man who in his timidity squandered the chance to win his own mandate.

It was good stuff, and you should definitely subscribe to our email. For my part, I’m strongly inclined to the view that Burnham won’t go for an early election — not because it wouldn’t be sensible, but simply because it is the path that requires less courage. It would take a lot of nerve to go to the country knowing that you would lose a lot of MPs and that Reform UK would undoubtedly win many more and perhaps end up facing you across the Despatch Box, and we have no evidence that Burnham has it.

But I spent yesterday evening in the company of someone who believes strongly that there will be an early election, and eventually the debate boiled down to what I think is an interesting hypothetical: what exactly would the offer be?

Let me lay our scene. Our Friend in the North has become Labour leader and spent a couple of months doing popular things, as one does; in the course of this, he has passed whatever popularity threshold his team has set internally as their trigger point for an election. So far, so good. Except.

First, he needs a reason. Labour has an enormous majority in the House of Commons, so Burnham can’t plead the need for a majority to pass day-to-day business. The obvious case would be to win a mandate for radical policy, but what? Nobody cares enough about devolution for it to be a sensible centrepiece for a general election campaign.

The obvious alternative would be some deviation on fiscal policy: either spending cuts, or tax rises. But is either feasible? Remember, Labour’s 2024 vote was extraordinarily efficient and even if Burnham got a much bigger bounce than current polling suggests, it would lose seats in an election. 

Which means one of two things happens. If Burnham somehow tried to fight an election on a platform of spending cuts and lost scores of MPs in the process, his party would never forgive him and would become immediately as ungovernable as it has proven for Sir Keir Starmer. Or he tries to fight an election on meaningful tax rises — meaning tax rises that ordinary voters will notice — which would be brave but, politically, extremely foolish.

Britain lives, and will probably live for some time yet, in the long shadow of the 2017 general election. Theresa May went into that leading Jeremy Corbyn by 50 points to 25, and ended up losing the Conservatives’ overall majority. Starmer learned the lesson; despite enjoying a comfortable poll lead for over a year before the 2024 general election, neither he nor Reeves dared level with the electorate about the tax implications of their spending plans. There is zero evidence that voters have become more amenable to tax rises (on themselves) since then.

Of course, the alternative to big, serious tax rises has always been small, trivial, spiteful tax increases; in 2024 Labour got an awful lot of mileage out of pledging to abolish non-dom status and levy VAT on private schools, for all that both have turned out not, in practice, to raise any money at all.

But that was in a self-consciously narrow and reassuring manifesto. Neither of those measures was supposed to finance the transformation of the British economy; that would come from the return of “growth”, which would follow naturally from ending “Tory chaos” and getting “the grown-ups back in the room”. They were meant to fund retail giveaways, and even allowing for the revenues being double- and triple-counted that’s all they really did.

Burnham will almost certainly not be able to get away with a similar manifesto. Even if you believe that devolution is going to solve this country’s growth problems (in which case please wake up, you are surrounded by your family and they love you) it will not do so over a handful of years, and voters do not care about the technical details — not at the best of times and certainly not several years into a chronic cost-of-living “crisis” and a couple of decades into a stagnant economy.

So the Mancunian Candidate will need an ambitious-sounding, transformational-seeming manifesto, that has some eye-catching giveaways to voters, that neither increases any of the major revenue taxes nor spooks the bond markets. And honestly, as far as I can tell, that Venn diagram is just a series of circles.

I think it will be easier for him to drift slowly towards defeat in 2029 than to press the button on an election

I may well be wrong. After all, my theory of mind for Andy Burnham can’t really account for his (or anyone, really) trying to become prime minister in current circumstances. He likes being liked and has just left a job in which being liked is easy to pursue one in which he will swiftly become satanically unpopular; so doing requires a truly staggering (perhaps delusional) degree of self-belief which may well lead him to think that none of these problems exist. 

But in the end, I think it will be easier for him to drift slowly towards defeat in 2029 than to press the button on an election which destroys his image either this year or next. Especially if his team concludes that there exists no policy which is both election-winningly popular and free.