165: Crash And Burnham

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1:14Who is Andy Burnham and what does he want? And how can he be stopped? Why be any see? Well, I should explain exactly why we're talking about this now. because at time of writing, he's been banned by Keir Starmer and the Labour NEC from standing as an MP. He's currently mayor of Greater Manchester and he would have to resign from that post in order to do it. Now, I would say we did have a number crunch in the last issue, which was the number of U-turns by Keir Starmer up until going to press. And we did have to change that several times in the course of the week as we were putting the pages together.

1:45But that's currently the situation. So, yeah, Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester. I mean, incredible poll numbers. Elected three times as mayor of Manchester. He got 63.4 % in 2017, 67.3 % in 2021. It's going up. It's quite a rarity that the incumbent goes up. And then 63.4 % again in May 2024, last time he stood. So you can kind of see why people are thinking, ooh, someone who actually the public seemed to like and who might actually win some votes might be a good thing for the Labour Party. Has he been effective? Has he done a good job in Manchester? I tried to work out what the best measure of this was.

2:21I looked in the Private Eye Archive. He's barely appeared in Rotten Boroughs in all of his time in Charter, Greater Manchester. So I think that does give you a level of, yeah, he's been pretty good. So when this by-election was announced, he suggested he would like to stand for the seat. He has been blocked from standing by the high command council, the Jedi Council of the Labour Party, if you like, by a thumping majority of about eight to one. so as I understand it their reasoning and I know there are other reasons apart from what they suggested but their reasoning was you've just been elected or recently been elected Mayor of Greater Manchester if we let you stand in this by-election to become an MP again we'll have to have another election in Greater Manchester that seems like a bad use of party resources and at least one thing they're not keen on they don't like having local elections if they can possibly get away with it but if he left the Greater Manchester mayoralty they'd probably lose that Yes.

3:14I mean, the argument that, oh, no, reform will win a significant victory. Will they win either way? I mean, surely, I mean, I hate to sound as though I think Keir's done might have been right. But he's done two years, has he, as mayor? He's got another due to get one. Why not finish the term? Why not indicate that Labour's there for the long term? It can stick to what it says it's going to do rather than a man saying, oh, look, it's a chance for me to be leader. I mean, the whole stick of the Labour Party was these terrible Tories, they change their leader every five minutes. Why can't they grow up?

3:46They all said psychodrama a lot. That was written into all Labour speeches, all Tory psychodrama. And what have we got? We've got a Labour psychodrama with Burnham just turning up. I looked at a previous cover. I mean, we had Andy Burnham saying, you know, I'd like to lead the Labour Party and Keir Starmer saying so would I. I mean, you know, give him a chance. But we have done this a lot, haven't we? Yeah, in a very real sense, Andy Burnham has been running to be Labour leader since at least 2010. That was his first crack at it, right? He's done it officially twice, yeah, 2010 and 2015. He ran and lost.

4:16Yeah, so he lost to Ed Miliband, he lost to Jeremy Corbyn. I remember I went to the first Labour Party conference after the pandemic, the one they had in person, so 2021. I was on a panel about devolution with him. And he was late because he was being stopped for autographs and selfies. Because at the time, Keir Starmer was in trouble and he was peacocking around guy and kind of going, do you know who else is available? Me, Andy Burnham. And he'd got his little uniforms, he'd got these little polo shirts, Fred Perry polo shirts and stuff. And then he did exactly the same at last year's party conference.

4:47He gave a big interview to the New Statesman in which he said, I don't really agree with the financial markets dictating our policy, I don't know what that's all about. Which spooked the market. And then, it was quite a deal of, for all that there are some people who really really love him, there are also quite a lot of people who think, give over. and I, you know, what's that great line that I always think of Mr Bennett? Let the other young ladies have a chance to exhibit. You have been doing this now for 16 years, Andy. I think there is a really strong feeling in the Labour Party and in the country now that sort of anyone but Keir would be better.

5:20And there's an argument possibly to be made for that. Maybe even a woman, Adam, for the first time in 116 years. Yes, that's something Labour have never been terribly keen on, have they? No, no, no. Didn't Keir have the choice this time of the newspapers and the media saying, oh, you're so pathetic, you're going to let him run, or, oh, you're so pathetic, you've stopped him. You're pathetic, Keir. Either way, it didn't really matter which way he went, did it? The narrative is still, you're useless. I think the thing it reveals to me, and this is very nerdy, I'm sorry, is that one of the key things if you want to run the Labour Party is you've got to have control of the National Executive Committee, which sounds extraordinarily boring, but is extraordinarily true.

5:57Corbyn never really got a grip on the party until he had installed Carrie Murphy, his choice, to run the party. Same thing happened with Starmer. He had to get his own person in control before he could... Because then you get a huge amount of control over, for example, selections. Right? So there is... You're right that the Tories have this kind of regicidal appetite. The way to win in Labour is just to kind of seize control of the bureaucracy and just, like, hold it in a vice-like grip and thereby see off all your opponents through grinding procedural motions. And that's what Keir Starmer's been really good at, isn't it?

6:27Yeah, yeah. It's absolute control of the party. Yeah. which was kind of what they felt they needed after the chaos of the Corbyn years, I guess. Do you have a prediction? Will this work? I don't think he's going to be allowed to stand this time around. I mean, he's the king across the water, isn't he? Whatever happens, he's going to go. This term runs through until 2028. We've probably got through several other prime ministers by then, won't we? But he clearly is coming back for another part. I mean, there is no pretense about this. He is not pretending anything other than that he wants to take over the leadership of the Labour Party.

6:59He wrote the week before he announced he was standing for the by-election a piece for The Guardian about his political philosophy, which turns out to be Manchesterism. Yes. Which means not taking a coat off and going down the house. No, it doesn't. Sorry.

7:16He made the point about the various things he has done for Manchester. They brought the bus and tram system back into public control, which is a big problem anywhere outside of London because privatisation meant that everything is disconnected and run for profit or run down completely. He's been brilliant on the Hillsborough, campaigning on behalf of the Hillsborough families and pushing for the Hillsborough law, which incidentally was Keir Starmi Uta number 14, one of the ones we had to update last week. He swerved very cleverly the Corbyn years by standing as he did actually serve under Corbyn.

7:45He was first shadow Home Secretary under Corbyn. And then in 2017, left Parliament to stand for Manchester mayor. But ever since then, he's kind of defined himself against Westminster. This is him in a 2019 interview. He said, Westminster is a bizarre place with a deeply dysfunctional atmosphere. I don't miss it in the slightest. It's just poisonous now. Try it six years on from that. And then this struck me last week in The Guardian. He kicked off by having a pop at reform and saying, oh, you know, all these Tories coming up. It's hardly the stuff of a political insurgency. Suddenly, Britain's newest political force doesn't look quite so potent or relevant.

8:18Instead, it seems old, says cabinet minister in 2007. So they're not, neither of these from Andy Burnham are brilliant arguments for bringing him back into Westminster and becoming leader. I like the fact that he's named this movement Manchesterism as opposed to Burnhamism, which is what he means. It's a sort of faux modesty, isn't it? There's surely a lot of advantage to be made about being anti-Westminster at the moment. I mean, the number of... That's Reform's whole pitch as well, isn't it? There absolutely is, but then it does get difficult when you get into Westminster, doesn't it? And also...

8:50And also... Reform's thing at the moment is saying, well, we're no good at it, so we're just going to get in loads and loads of Tories. I mean, as we write, Suella Braverman has just defected to Reform. She's the latest one. It does actually now mean they've got more Reform MPs who used to be Tory MPs than they've got of their own now, doesn't it? Which is pretty extraordinary. And it's now a party full of people who the electorate rejected last time, which, again, may not be promising. And Suella Bramper, I mean, she hesitated for so long. I assumed she thought that reform weren't right-wing enough and she was just waiting.

9:18But now seems to be the moment. It is a bit weird recording this podcast two weeks after we had a big discussion about ICE having just killed a civilian with no justification and Nadeem Zahawi just having defected to reform. I mean... It's a repeat. It's stuck forever. It's Andrew Rossendale I feel sorry for. I mean, there's no impact whatsoever. two days after I'm just going to say on behalf of lots of listeners who yes well exactly he was the one who went two days after Robert Jenrick and said by the way I'm defected to reform as well and everyone did go who I mean for a long time he wasn't allowed on the Commons estate while various allegations were investigated so he may not have had the chance to make the biggest impact did you watch the Robert Jenrick Nigel Farage press conference I did on holiday oh god now you know how to have fun the best thing was Nigel Farage saying basically the door is closing on May the 5th right you act now to secure your place in reform.

10:09Like, I won't let any of you jump. You know, the rats must leave the sinking ship now. I get this with Instagram adverts all the time, though. You know, we're having our last ever closing down sale of 50 % off. It never is. No. It never is. It was just a truly bizarre... Both of them sat there behind that little table as various journalists read out disobliging quotes they'd said about each other, and they went, ha, ha, ha, when I said he was a twat, I meant in a sort of jokey way. Well, I like the sort of shame confessional that Nigel will now make you read out if you do defect. You have to say, Robert's very ashamed of having been in the Conservatives.

10:43Yes, I am, Nigel, yes. And you have to say, Britain is broken. Britain is broken. And it's broken partly because I was in government and I broke it. But I have now seen the light. That's why I'm such a huge asset. Sue Anna Braberman had to say, I now feel at home, as opposed to send everyone else home. I mean, it's just, what are we watching? The I ran a cover last time, people were worried that she was about to defect. And it was exactly the same sentiment. She said, I'm throwing my hate into the ring. And she's doing it again. Presumably. I mean, Helen, does Farage think these people are a threat or not?

11:20I think he specifically thinks they're not a threat, which is why he's allowing them to have it. Because I think the bit that he lacks is any organisational infrastructure, right? Like he just, he needs that mechanics of running things. And also, I think he's genuinely preparing to be prime minister next time round. And you might say, Soella Braverman kept getting sacked from the Home Office, but she does have cabinet-level experience. That is true. And he really has never had that. But as we've described on this podcast before, it'd be interesting to see whether or not they do the full stretch.

11:53The bit that fascinated me at that Jemrick press conference was a bit where Robert Jemrick was forced to say, I haven't been promised any kind of job. And I thought, well, if that's true, then you're stupid, so I don't believe you. you're really going to hang around and just having had all this ambition you surely have got to be thinking Nigel smokes quite a lot I'm quite young and on the exemptive I can wait this one out But I think they're also going to have a problem they've got so many people who are going to want the same jobs should they come into government Richard Tice has obviously always assumed he's going to be Chancellor I think Zia Yusuf kind of thinks he might be Chancellor Zahawi definitely thinks he could come back and do it again declaring all his tax stuff this time hopefully.

12:32Well no one's desperately pitching for the Duchy of Lancaster are they? No one wants those coming jobs. They want to be Chancellor. But even more to the point it's so top heavy. I mean what they really need to have people defecting now is the kind of the practical ground level stuff. Are they getting the constituency associations and the kind of electoral agents and things? Are they defecting from the Tories? Because that's where you really need the experience on the ground to get people out. You know it's people who are going to, you don't need a lot of preening ex-Cabinet ministers. What you need is a lot of people who are going to go onto doorsteps in the rain and shove leaflets through people's letterboxes.

13:00That they probably do have because they're membership although quite opaque i think it's now bigger than the tories and bigger even than labor but you're right that those would be the people i if i was nigel friday trying to bring on board is the constituency chairman and women who are the people who can run a selection process who can you know yeah and the most that we've heard from them is sort of generics constituency people saying we're absent we're outraged he always said he wasn't going to do as he promised to us so they all when they defect say i've always been conservative it's in my dna but as of yesterday i've noticed i'm gonna lose my seat um they all do this big loyalty number whereas i think from my experiences the people in the constituencies are conservative um and that's why they've pushed leaflets through doors for years they are more likely to be loyal so i'll be really interested to see whether that army of people actually do defect i'm not sure the real challenge is going to be getting the vote out in individual constituencies they've still got in a first past the post system.

13:56A hell of a hill to climb. Well, 320 whatever hills to climb. And that's going to be where the real difficulty for them lies, I think. Can I just give you my top fact about Andy Burnham? He's an ex-journalist. Very, very briefly he worked for trade mags, including Tank World, which amazingly isn't as exciting as it sounds. Tanky World? Because it is the world's premier bulk liquid transportation publication. Oh, that kind of tank. That sort of tank. I'm as interested it, I'm afraid.

14:55spot with just$200 down at BKFSEA.com. Saturday, September 26th, two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide, Bare Knuckle. Liverpool's own Darren the Gorilla Till goes to war with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God Romero. Plus, the Bare Knuckle Middleweight Championship of the World is on the line when the reigning champ Dave the Redneck Mundell defends against undefeated British challenger Jack the Meek Pleaver Cullen. BKFC 94, Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com. Donald Trump has finally recommitted to the multilateral process, the rules-based order.

15:37He has set up an organisation called the Board of Peace. I, for one, can't wait to find out how it's going to work, how much peace it's going to be bringing to the world. Helen, you've been reading a bit more about it, right? Yes, so much peace. He had the signing ceremony for it, at Davos, accompanied by some of the people who have signed up. Now, he has previously said that the United Nations is useless, not least when he appeared at the United Nations, if you remember. Not least that escalator didn't work, which upset him an enormous amount. So he turned up at Davos and said, well, we might work with it, but this is the kind of new kid in town.

16:09So do you want to hear about the rules for the Board of Peace? Anyone can join. I would say anyone can join. I don't think you can join personally, but any country can join for a three-year term. But if you want to be a permanent member, a billion dollars, guess who the founding director and chair of the Board of Peace is. And indeed lifetime chair of the Board of Peace. I think I can guess his surname. It's Donald J. Trump. The only way he can be removed is if he steps down or is voted out by a unanimous vote of the board whom he is appointed. This is after his presidency ends. Oh, yeah. No, he gets to keep it after he stops being president.

16:46If he ever stops being president. and is there any suggestion as to where this money is going a good if unanswered question so he said it won't be run with like a huge amount of executive bloat but given that trump has and the trump family generally have a lot of crypto interests where it's not entirely clear where some of their foreign you know trading and stuff like that where that money ends up i i would love to see a paper trail for where this if the if the money ever gets handed i mean the whole thing just looked like a sort of weird not a bit like the sort of sealed knot reenactments of battles.

17:21It was like a sort of reenactment of the UN but with like a school nativity play version of the UN. I just don't know how real it actually will be. So it started off as a Gaza thing. Right. And so there's a couple of different boards. There's the executive board, there's the Gaza executive board and then there's a board of actual Palestinians who I think are actually going to have to do any hard work. The first we heard about this was Tony Blair was going to sit on it, wasn't he? He is and he's on. Is he on the main one or is he on the Gaza one? he's on the executive board and there was a great moment when Trump So has he ponied up a billion?

17:51No I don't think even what are they called the company's fire rush and wind rush his sort of dictator bums rush being the main one he's sitting on one of the boards as an individual alongside like Steve Wyckoff the Middle East envoy, Jared Kushner Trump's son-in-law the porcelain doll, yes the haunted porcelain doll that is his son-in-law someone needs to have a word with esthetician I think about just dialing back the Botox a bit then again not being very easily surprised is probably when you work in a Trump orbit you don't want to register any emotions sounds like a great idea sir let's get on it immediately anyway so that's the personal bit and there was a great bit in the ceremony when Trump was introducing people he said you know we've got people on the board some popular some less popular he said looking at Tony Blair it was quite harsh I felt and then he brought them all up to sign so Javier Melay his big mulleted friend of Argentina.

18:48Mr Chainsaw. Mr Chainsaw's on there. Viktor Orban of Hungary, who's a big Trump lackey, was obviously on there. He's representing the liberal wing. You say he brought them all up to sign. Actually, two of the members of the border peace couldn't attend because they're under international arrest warrants, aren't they? In the form of Alexander Lukashenko and... Vladimir Putin has only been invited. He's still quibbling over whether or not he will, in fact, join up or not. Benjamin Netanyahu, as well, has got a bit of bother with the International Criminal Court. Yes, a bit of a legal issue there.

19:17And also, one of Putin's things that he's as ever trolling about is whether or not his billion could come from seized Russian assets. So essentially money he doesn't currently have access to. Right. And he could use it to pay his entry fee. OK, but I'm hearing a lot of scepticism, frankly, guys, and I don't like it. Let's focus on the piece. Yes. Because we know Trump's already ended eight wars. So are there really any more left to end? Well, a very good point. There was a moment, a particularly haunting moment, when Jared Kushner was brought up to do what I can only describe as, actually to use your word, a sort of haunted McKinsey keynote quarter two presentation about his plan for Gaza, which was quite heavy on sort of little diagrams about arrows of stuff going to each other.

20:01And then there was a plan for what he's going to do to Rafa City. So in Gaza, 80 % of the buildings have been destroyed. It's a huge rebuilding project. But it was kind of like, here are some skyscrapers. But, you know, almost you were expecting to see sort of like little flying cars around the AI generated images. But that's, you know, that's where some of the money could go. This is a question. Who's going to pay to rebuild Gaza? Trump keeps saying it should be the surrounding Muslim countries. Obviously, Israel are not very keen to pay maybe some of this money in the best possible. If I was going to be able to give you the best, most generous assessment, other countries could chip in.

20:31But essentially the point of doing... They could do that anyway. Yeah, well, right. They don't have to do it via some fatuous body that Trump has just invented. Yes, and I would always worry in this situation that he's going to invent like Gaza coin and for everybody to put their money into some sort of special meme coin for the rebuilding of Gaza. Money is later never to be seen again. I believe that the Board of Peace has been accepted or endorsed somehow by the, is it the UN Security Council? The UN has got a resolution about the rebuilding of Gaza, which they are working in accordance with, and that's Trump's 20 point plan.

21:06But the UN has done kind of what I would sort of expect them to do, which is gone, great, get on with it, lads. Let's all see you in Rafa when it's rebuilt. You crack on. But it struck me that Trump's initiative to have an alternative UN, like nearly all his decisions, hinges on one moment where he felt slighted. So it's the speech where Obama was mildly rude to him. This is his visit to the UN. And he thinks that the UN slighted him because he said, you're a collection of shithole countries that don't work. I don't know what I'm doing. I could do it much better. And the teleprompt doesn't work.

21:42And he's decided to set up an alternative UN. How long this will last is anyone's guess. Well, anyone who guesses less than five minutes. But essentially, all he's doing is attempting to replace something he hates with something with him in charge. that's the modus operandi and running it kind of like Mar-a-Lago he's running it like a golf club or a private members club which is you have an entry fee and then you have all these fabulous benefits which mostly are hanging around with the President of the United States the interesting thing is I was surprised, well maybe I wasn't surprised that Viktor Orban signed up to it I guess a lot of those leaders are thinking we'll never have to pony up this money he'll have forgotten about it in 10 minutes or we'll say it's going to be in special bonds or something bollocks like that but the European Union were just hard no.

22:30Macron in France said, we're not joining this. And then he said, I'm going to put, Trump said, I'm going to put 200 % tariffs on champagne, which was just a kind of great, like, what's the most French thing I can think of? I'm going to attack strikes and yellow vets. Small moustaches. And small tops. French fries, probably. He's got a history. And then Mark Carney of Canada gave a very good speech at Davos, which was about what he called the middle powers. He said, you know, we're now entering this era again of the great power rivalry. America, China, Russia and then where does that leave the second tier countries and he said if we're not going to be subservient we have got to kind of work together and he talked about the fact that Canada has obviously got is contributing to the war in Ukraine for example and that was the kind of actually one of the most interesting things that might come out of Trump at Davos and the border peace is a kind of not like a super European Union but actually the sort of border peace which will be what I think of as sane countries basically.

23:26Part of the problem for Trump is that his criticism of the UN was it's sclerotic nothing ever happens because you've got all these conflicting voices like say having Russia on the same panel as China or America and he's replicated that so how he thinks this is an alternative model in which there will be easily arranged accords between major powers which will sort everything out Isn't that what he objected to in the UN? Well, it seems that a lot of it is government by announcement. Trump is very, very nervous about any kind of sustained military engagement anywhere, clearly, but loves a big raid, strike on somewhere, we've gone in, we've sorted out Venezuela.

24:09We've run out again. Yeah, exactly that. And it seemed a bit like that to me. I suspect the answer to it will be that there isn't a lot of debate and a lot of voting between different people who disagree on things. So I had a look at the opening charter of the board piece. So decisions should be made by a majority of the member states present by voting subject to the approval of the chairman. So, you know, it's not even like a deciding vote. It's actually like whether he wants it to go ahead or not. I reckon First Order of Business will be instituting some sort of Board of Peace prize that they can then award to Trump.