How Reform and the Tories plan to fight Andy Burnham

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1:12Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots. I'm Nell Hoffman and today I'm delighted to be joined by Tim Shipman and James Heal. James, in this week's magazine, you've written a column all about how Reform and the Tories plan to fight Andy Burnham. So what is their strategy? Well, it is currently to wait and see how he will differ from Keir Starmer. It seems that both of them are essentially saying that he represents a continuation of what's come before. I think there are some subtly different kind of critiques, though. I mean, the Tories were very much impressed by John Healy in some senses. They want to basically say it's more about the kind of fiscal constraints around him.

1:48Whereas reform, when they're criticising him, see him as very much a last gasp of kind of failed establishments. You saw Robert Jenrick going after his record under Gordon Brown, very much kind of the continuation of the Uni Party, what's come before. So some slightly different critiques about how they're going to go after Labour, but really both are sort of stressing how prepared they are in case there is an election. And that's because there's been this drumbeat of announcements this week. Parliament is not sitting, which obviously tends to be terrain much favourable to the Conservatives, who've done pretty well in terms of the Leader of the Opposition side of things, I would argue.

2:18So right now they're briefing about how ready they are. So, Kenny Bainock discussed at the last shadowed cabinet a potential of an early election. Everyone in reform thinks it'll be done by May 2027. The single question I hear most from reform is, when is there going to be an election? Do you think it's going to be an election? And that's why they're both sort of taking a real emphasis on candidate selection. And reported this week that Grant Shapps is one of at least 10 former MPs who have failed their assessment. And that very much...

2:44James Heale: The old A-list is now the Z-list. And that's very much dominated Kenny Bainock's press conference yesterday morning. Tim, what do you make of how reform and the Tories have been responding to Burnham so far? And was it the right move from Kemi to shaft Shaps? I think there's been many people over the years who have wanted to shaft Shaps. One of the lesser commentators responding to James's revelation of this story said, I wonder if he's applying under all his different names, which is a little unfair. But look, Shaps was very much of his era, very sort of energetic presence. But he was totally part of the David Cameron gang and then the Boris Johnson gang.

3:29James Heale: And if you're looking to move on, it's a sort of symbolic move you can make. And to say, you know, look, this is a different party. And we, you know, it's partly, I think, what do we look like? Do we echo the old days or do we not? And it's partly sort of Kemi Badeknot wanting to get some younger people in and impose a bit more sort of ideological kind of uniformity. I think Shapps was on that kind of, I mean, he was fairly malleable. I think if he'd wanted Grant Shapps to pass his assessment, he would have passed his assessment. But clearly they wanted to make a bit of a statement by saying no to some of the retreads.

4:05James Heale: And it turns out that Tory retreads are not that much more popular in the Tory party than they are in reform, it would seem. Look, I think the key point is the one James made at the top, which is everyone's still waiting to see what Andy Burnham's going to do. And that includes half of the Labour Party, who still don't really know which of the stated priorities are actual priorities. And as I wrote this week, we won't really know until we see the colour of his money in the budget. And those will be the decisions that will actually shape things. Now, there is a theory during the rounds that by making a series of unfunded pledges and effectively putting together a 10-year plan, as we're told Andy Burnham is going to do, that is the sort of thing former number 10 people have been contacting me this week to say, well, that's exactly what you do if you're planning to call a general election.

4:48James Heale: Everybody I know close to Burnham has been impressing upon me that he won't call a general election. And why would he throw away this stunking great majority? And however well he did, it would likely involve the loss of a bunch of seats for Labour MPs. But the mere fact that everything is not yet clear, the fact that we're now going to go into a summer recess where the real meat of politics won't return until the start of September, where we have the party conferences and then the budget, there's going to be a lot of drift. What is going to happen? I mean, you know, I can tell you for free now, this will be the first of about 25 occasions on which we're likely to discuss whether there's going to be a general election through the summer.

5:24James Heale: It's going to be the party game, the parlour game for Westminster. It's going to drive Burnham up the wall. You know, the problem is there's not really a simple answer to the question. Is it the right thing to do? We saw Boris Johnson force an election and win a large majority. We saw Theresa May do it for no other purpose than that she wanted a mandate on Brexit and perhaps to increase her majority. and she ended up getting punished by the electorate for her pains. Gordon Brown, of course, is the seminal moment in the Labour Party, the most obviously comparable situation to now. And a lot of people would conclude that he should have gone for it in 2007 and there'll be people around Burnham who think that sometime in the spring is the most propitious moment for him to go for it.

6:05James Heale: But I don't detect that most of the people I've been talking to are remotely enthusiastic about it. There is some talk that James Pennell, the Chief of Staff, is interested in it. But ultimately, it's one of those ones where the sort of elected wing of the party tends to have slightly more clout than the unelected. So, James and Tim, today, Andy Burnham has declared, is the best day of his life. Blimey. Quote Andy Burnham. Wonder how Mrs Burnham feels about that one. And that is because today marked the official opening of number 10 North. James, just how significant is this development? And is today the best day of your life as well?

6:47No, but then unlike Andy Burnham, I don't have a marriage and three kids.

6:51James Heale: What would the best day of your life look like, James? What is it you've been dreaming of since childhood were you to be Prime Minister? Is it the opening of an office in Manchester? Or is it maybe, I don't know, sorting out social care or curing cancer or something like that, rather than opening a mid-range office block two hours to the north? Well, for someone who always likes to talk a good game, I'd say there's a positive ambition in terms of Andy Burnham's announcement today. Look, I mean, you know, God help us. Is that the best day of his life? But I think this is the easy bit in some ways.

7:20It's easy to open a building, say you're putting some jobs in there, put some flags up, etc. We have a kind of tradition of that in recent times. You think about the Treasury campus in Darlington. You think about other government departments that have sort of moved offices out.

7:32James Heale: Most of us lie awake thinking of little else, of course. The Treasury campus in Darlington. And Rishi Sunak's finest hour. The much more fundamental thing will be kind of reversing, let's say about, you know, maybe about 70 years or so since you stopped having the kind of great northern industrial powerhouses, as it were. And that's going to be much more fundamental. And I think it's a point that Neil O 'Brien made in the interview I did for The Spectator, which is that actually you need anchor industries. You need something like Nissan in Sunderland. You need to have things which are kind of drive growth.

8:01And so he might have the, you know, happy day-to-day and all the sort of, I don't know, fireworks and cake you can enjoy etc but um it's quite striking to me that a lot of the jobs that appear on the gov.uk website for this new number 10 north tend to be content producers and i think there is a lot of skepticism in the civil service why i'm picking up that how many people are actually going to want to move out there and then of course there's a more fundamental mission which is how do you solve the uk's long-time growth problem of getting growth outside the southeast of england to be fair manchester is a hub for influencers um molly may haig the ultimate influencer lives in Manchester.

8:34And speaking of the more serious issues, I mean, as you said, James, alongside, you know, the fun of cutting a ribbon to open a building in Manchester, yesterday, Burnham announced that he is putting a pause on the prison early release scheme. There's a lot of uproar about the scheme where 5000 prisoners were meant to be let out in September, two of whom could have been the killers of PC Andrew Harper. Tim, what does this whole situation sort of tell us about the challenges Burnham faces?

9:06James Heale: Well, look, I don't want to be totally dismissive of number 10 North. It is, you know, if this becomes a thing, it is significant. You know, everyone in this country at the top of politics agrees that there needs to be some kind of rebalancing. But London has become this massive hub for a reason. And it's difficult to sort of structurally fix against it but look if if this becomes a real thing with credible civil servants and the guy running it is someone i know and is a is a credible serious experience character who's been around whitehall for a long time you know the former chief executive of manchester greater manchester authorities going off to help run it as well if burnham spends some time there if it becomes a credible thing that helps with devolution and regional policy and all the rest of it it could be a driver for growth and of course it's good to have different voices outside of the islington Labour Party making policy in this country.

9:54James Heale: I think we're all a little bit sceptical because structurally it's quite difficult to have power in two places at once. The more significant move, I would argue, is not the opening of a building in Manchester, but the fact that the Cabinet Secretary, Antonio Romeo, has a seat in the outer office of the Prime Minister's number 10, which is the first time that's ever happened. And that suggests a level of joined up kind of clout between the political and the civil service operation, which could actually make far more difference for driving change than than any opening in manchester i think it's going to be very interesting i mean guido forks had just reported that um took the plane on his first day well of course he did he can't get on the train otherwise there'd be a security issue i agree i agree but my point was going to be the people around bernan given how we know he very much is impressed by the people around him and kind of the influence of his thinking it might be slightly different sort of people are important to this government than previous ones you know just genuinely the people around him on those trips etc could prove hugely important in his thinking and the story and life of this government.

10:48James Heale: Yeah, and if you spend time talking to different people and you spend time in Manchester, then that's going to have an effect. Going back to what you were asking about the prisons policy, I think this means two things. One, it's been paused, it hasn't been stopped, and that highlights what an intractable problem this is. And every Justice Secretary that I've spoken to for the last 15 years has regarded it as a major problem and there isn't enough prison capacity. We seem to find it very difficult to build prisons in this country. I remember a conversation with James Forsyth, formerly of this parish, when he'd gone off to work for Rishi Sunak.

11:21James Heale: And I said, what surprised you most when he was leaving number 10 about it? And he's, you know, various things about security and all the rest of it. But one of the things that struck me most was, you know, we tried to build prison places. We tried every single day. We tried to change the rules. We tried to make this a priority. We held meetings to get everybody together. We bashed heads together. everybody wanted to do it and it still wasn't possible to build them quickly enough and there is a difference between the sort of nightingale stick up a warehouse and shove people in it that Nigel Farage is recommending and and the prison estate that is sort of prison architects demand and you know a lot of the legislation in press place demands prisons don't need to be terribly sophisticated they need to keep people locked up inside and they need to be humane places in which to live they don't need to be architectural marvels and I remember Forsyth saying to me it was just far too difficult to to do that so this is a massive problem and Andy Burnham will discover it's a massive problem but I think the encouraging thing from Labour's point of view is that he gets that this looks absolutely terrible you can't go around releasing murderers and paedophiles and and rapists and think that the public is just going to sit there and go well I totally understand that there's a a very serious problem with the prison capacity that the public is bad couldn't stay away for too long he's just sort of you know living rent-free in my head but um But that was the Starmer approach, you know, and Burnham gets it.

12:43James Heale: He understands it looks awful. He doesn't want to do it. And instead of rationalising why to do it, he's tried to find a way not to do it. Now, whether he succeeds or not is something we will only probably know in the autumn. But the fact that he even wants to try suggests that this bloke is 10 times better at politics than the last bloke. And that, going back to where we begun, is something that the Tories and reform are going to have to reckon with. They don't quite know how to attack Burnham yet, because while he's not wildly popular, people are looking at him and thinking, well, he looks all right.

13:17James Heale: And he's got a bit of a following wind in terms of the media and the public. He's got a personality. He's a very good communicator. He also, I think the thing that ties it together, he understands that the man in Whitehall doesn't know best. And I think too often Keir Star-Masori's role to be the voice of officialdom and to be sort of repetition of a received authority rather than questioning it. And one of the things with Burnham is he's got a different kind of skill set from 10 years out of my semester. Well, you talk to someone like Dominic Cummings or Morgan McSweeney or anybody else who's been in government.

13:43James Heale: Ministers keep getting sent legal advice. And it always says there's a 70 % chance this will be challenged and there's a 70 % chance we'll win. And if you clear both of those thresholds, if you clear that we'll probably win, you're basically allowed to do it. Cummings' view was if you didn't like the legal advice, get new lawyers. Ministers need to be able to say, actually, we're prepared to tolerate more risk than this. Starmer and Richard Hermer were not prepared to tolerate risk. They think the law is, you know, holy writ, handed down on tablets of stone from some great authority in the sky.

14:15James Heale: And Burnham, I think, will be prepared to, on the public's behalf, fight some of this stuff. And frankly, politically, it's often a lot better to fight it and lose and look like you care than it is to just supinely in the quiet corridors of number 10 or the cabinet office say, oh, well, if that's the case, then we should go along with it. I'm going to just find as many excuses as possible to do this because it's too pleasing not to. And then I will spend serious time over the next month working on the Burnham voice. Well, we all look forward to hearing the Burnham voice and he is certainly keeping us busy over recess.

14:50Thank you, Tim. Thank you, James. And thank you for listening to Coffeehouse Shots.

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