Drill Andy drill! – Burnham's small victory

0:00Tim Shipman: Ever notice how every new AI tool asks you to explain your business to it all over again? Google Workspace with Gemini skips that. You get Google's AI built right into the premium versions of Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and more. No new tools, no extra logins. Just one subscription that gives you personalized AI right inside your actual workflow. Make work less work. Try Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle slash workspace with Gemini.

0:37James Heale: Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots. I'm Tim Shipman and I'm delighted today to be joined by James Heal and of course Isabel Hardman. Now James, when you got back to the office after this edition of Prime Minister's Questions, you put it to us that Andy Burnham had won for perhaps the first time since his first week in charge. Make your case, young man.

0:57Tim Shipman: Well, he completely pulled the rug out from underneath Kemi Badenock, is my view. I mean, I think that Kemi was turning up to Prime Minister's question today, expecting to crow about Jackdaw. And unfortunately, I think that Andy Burnham made the case fairly sufficiently well and actually got a few blows in. He actually sort of seemed to me to return to the traditional successful model of PMQs, which was basically pointing out about Kemi Badenock's greatest weaknesses, which is their party's record in government, noting, of course, the timing of Liz Truss's second book, which we eagerly await, talking about their record with the mini budget, which is about the Shadow Chance Andrew Griffith.

1:28Tim Shipman: And I thought overall made a fairly reasonable case for why he was doing this now.

1:33James Heale: Well, we'll draw a discreet veil for now over the levels of excitement about Liz Truss's first book. Second book. Second book. As the author of the first book about Liz Truss, you may have a proprietorial view on that. Isabel, did Andy Burnham wipe the floor with dreadful old Kemi Badenock or not? I mean, if he was doing any floor wiping, it was sort of at the level you'd expect from a teenager who you'd ask to clean the house, as in it was hard to discern where the floor had been wiped and how. I don't think he was terrible, and I don't think he was amazing. And I think Kevin Badenut was probably the same.

2:10I thought it was a score draw with Badenut probably slightly edging it, but Burnham still being good. He's good at making... I actually thought his best one was when he had, and I didn't think I'd say this, having written quite a disparaging blog about it last night, when he was having a rant about the COVID inquiry, the way in which he turned on Badenock over her party's handling of the pandemic and told her to read the COVID inquiry report, I actually thought was quite effective. Having read the COVID inquiry report, I would suggest she doesn't bother reading it. But I think the way in which he did it was sort of classic Burnham, very passionate, at very he's actually quite good i think at doing moral righteousness in a way that doesn't sound pompous like keir starmer's moral righteousness in that you do actually genuinely get the impression that andy burnham wakes up in the middle of the night upset about injustice uh whereas for for keir starmer it was just you know part of a sort of garb that he wore and and he brought up the

3:14James Heale: covid inquiry in the context of whether or not he's prepared to make big decisions and effectively said read that and you'll see that the social care was in in a right old mess during covid and i've made the huge decision to tackle social care brave you know andy burnham crusading so basically james what we had here i think that there was a sort of there was a debate first about the rights and wrongs of giving the green light to more north sea fossil fuel drilling and then there was kind of an argument about whether or not really he's taking the big decisions you You know, Baden-Ock sort of mocked him for focusing on people playing music on the tube rather than dealing with the big stuff.

3:51James Heale: I mean, I actually think that's one of the most irritating things in modern life. And you can do both. And if you're kidding, there's no reason that you can't do both. But it was kind of a debate going on at two levels. It feels like you feel like he won the debate on, you know, Jack Doran Rosebank, effectively saying that the previous government screwed up the quasi-judicial process. I can feel you all turning off your machines even as we speak upon hearing those words. But I'm not sure he won the big picture argument, did he? I mean, she was sort of making the point that, you know, just saying you want to do something about social care isn't necessarily doing anything about it.

4:29Tim Shipman: No, I mean, I think that, you know, just to be clear, I don't think it was like a 3-0 thrashing, a kind of 8-2 Man U Arsenal result. I thought this was, you know, a 2-1 win for a team that's been struggling. Andy Burnham's garrison has cost him in previous weeks. He was fairly tight today. He actually launched a few good attacks, I thought, on the Conservatives. And in some context, he basically had already preempted the arguments. So I think that overall, there's the cost opportunity of PMQs. You know, a better line of argument, potentially, and I was chatting to a Tory and people, maybe talking about going on Miasa van Bulla and Shobana Mahmood's obvious rift on indefinite leave to remain.

5:02Tim Shipman: I just think that in the context, he basically seemed to be selling himself, I think, as a practical environmentalist, someone who cared about the climate, but also moving with the tides. I thought it was quite striking that reports from the SNP conference last week suggested that there wasn't a single member of the SNP or senior member of the SNP who would disagree with his decision to go over the Jackdaw. The climate has shifted. I agree Kami Bainock has maybe kind of won in the battle of ideas in a post-2024 sense, but ultimately you could say reform got there even beforehand with Richard Tyson at Stupid Zero.

5:31Tim Shipman: So I think, I don't know, I just felt in the circumstances it was a better performance by Kami Bainock. Burnham, I think overall, Kemi Bainock didn't score as many goals as she might have been hoping.

5:39James Heale: What do you think, Isabel? Because the original, what Kemi Bainock was trying to achieve to start with was effectively saying to Burnham, you've approved one, so why on earth don't you approve all these others? And he did admit that it improved our energy security to open up the North Sea in this way. So it felt like Burnham was on sort of problematic ground there in not having brilliant answers to that but at the same time I think James is right she could have gone on migration and that would have more obviously unleashed a rift in the Labour Party there wasn't much of a rift over this you didn't feel like he was in big trouble with his back benches on it and actually she you know she opened by saying last week I told the Prime Minister to stop faffing about um and I thought it would be a PMQs where she would be really hammering him on the things that he was faffing about because he was uncomfortable on them.

6:35Now, I thought she could have actually been much harder on him on welfare. And she did have that sort of, you know, the contrast between we're spending more on interest payments than we do on schools, the army and the police combine mean while the prime minister is worrying about loud music on trains. And as you say, Shiffers, you know, you can be annoyed about two things. It is, you know, I think we're all annoyed by loud music.

6:58James Heale: I just thought that was a bad example to use. There are other more sort of meaningless things. There are other less popular, meaningless things that the Prime Minister has done than that one. I would personally be happy to shoot people who don't use headphones on the tube, for example. Unless they're playing coffeehouse shots, in which case the people need to near it. Well, let's do it on coffeehouse shots. We'll bring them on and have them shot on... Pete Hexkitzel. Exactly. Live streaming it. It will bring a whole new meaning to coffeehouse shots. Putting the shots into coffeehouse. Exactly.

7:26Oh, God. But I thought she could have probably zeroed in on rather than what she's falling into the habit of doing, which is saying, oh, you're not cutting welfare yet. You're not cutting welfare yet. And I don't particularly like her argument where she says, oh, the prime minister wants to spend more money to save money because that is what you need to do in order to reform welfare. I just don't like it from a sort of nerdy point of view. It may be what you need to do to reform welfare.

7:49James Heale: But as a member of the Labour Party said to me this week, I've served in government for long periods of my life and I've never once found anything that we paid money into only then to cut. You're probably right from a policy point of view, but it does mean it never happens. Yeah, and I can understand it as a kind of a quip at PMQs, but I think it would have been more effective if she'd sort of borrowed into the personality issues that are going on. As you say, James, she could have moved on to immigration and the cabinet split on that and actually made the welfare issue much more of a party management thing as well.

8:25you know are you taking your time because your backbenchers are too scared are you taking your time because you're having to talk to them about the importance of the economy or whatever and she could have had much more of a theme of this man is happy to confront people who play music on trains but not happy to confront his own cabinet or backbenchers um which i think will be more of a theme over the autumn the most interesting answer for me was actually the answer on palestine action um which came after the exchanges between the two leaders because i genuinely didn't know what Burnham was going to say.

8:55He was asked by Claire Hanna, who's an SDRP MP. She was asking about Sally Rooney's book being withdrawn from sale because the publisher would have to pass the profits on to Palestine Action, which is her request. And Claire Hanna also said she had some constituents who had been arrested and I think possibly sentenced as a result of their support for Palestine Action. I was genuinely thinking, what is this man going to say? Is he going to say We're going to look again at, you know, the prescription that Keir Starmer brought in to show that we care more about Gaza. But actually, he said, you know, it followed a rigorous and evidence based process that came before this House endorsed by Parliament.

9:31So I thought, well, that's quite interesting. I mean, that would be one of those things that if you really wanted to be popular with the left, you might actually want to do.

9:40Tim Shipman: I agree. I think with Roy Jenkins, who once said that if you couldn't imagine a politician making completely the opposite statement, it wasn't an interesting remark. So, you know, I am for freedom. Or find me a politician who says I'm for despotism. You know, similarly, in Andy Burnham's reply. Donald Trump? Well, potentially in more of a British context. But I think you're right about the most interesting reply. I think a lot of it was very quite set-piece today. I suppose my overall point is that once you've conceded the principle Andy Burnham clearly has on Jackdaw, it just feels a bit of a sort of dead rubber in that sense.

10:08Tim Shipman: I do think, though, there is a question about both the reform and Conservatives, how both they attack Andy Burnham. And in one sense, I think you're right in what you said, which is that they don't know whether to attack him for not going far enough, being timid, but also a lot of things he's doing are very popular and it's hard to argue with some of that stuff. So I think there is still that sense of we're in the fair and war period. Maybe the budget will be the kind of Arnhem Forest, as it were, or maybe it's going to be the 10-year plan. But I think we're still waiting for the kind of crunch, as it were.

10:34Tim Shipman: But overall, I felt it was a little bit disappointing PMQs after quite a few interesting weeks.

10:38James Heale: Yeah, and having written about the budget this week, I'm not sure the budget is going to be the moment that we have all kind of expected it to be. You know, John Healy's people are very consciously kind of trying to make it a small wall budget. They're people saying to me privately, well, you know, we've got to get out of this habit of thinking, you know, just because it's got a big number on tax in it, that that makes it a big budget. They're trying to say this is a big, important budget, even though it won't have that. But the interesting kicker in the piece I've written is that, you know, Healy is almost halfway between.

11:11James Heale: The Labour Party want to spend much more money and kickstart their way out of their doldrums that way. You listen to the Conservative Party and now to Andy Haldane, who, you know, until quite recently was advising Andy Burnham, saying that will lead to, you know, Liz Trust Plus and some kind of disaster. They're all saying you've got to cut in a big way. And in fact, Healy looks like he's going to do a fairly sort of low numbered, bottom lined type budget. And the question then arises is, is boring also dangerous? And I think, you know, today's PMQs might be a very good example of how boring is not a great thing in British politics.

11:51James Heale: So it's not the size, it's how you use it, is what you're saying. That may be it, and that feels like the right moment on which to end. Thank you, James. Thank you, Isabel. And thank you to all of you for listening.

12:10Thank you.

12:38and create full campaigns with simple prompts. Send personalized messages backed by real-time feedback, smart segmentation, and effortless reporting that tracks every win. Let's redefine what's possible together. Get started for free at ActiveCampaign.com.