‘A legacy of surrender’: How Andy Burnham’s first week could break Britain

0:03The Telegraph.

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0:42Like most of the population of England today, I'm angry, I'm depressed. We've lost the football to the Argentinians. Is everything in Britain completely broken beyond repair? I'm going to be persuading Camilla that she should listen to Cracticus Pops from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, because from the ashes of disaster, grow the roses of success. And I like roses. Having said all that, Andy Burnham, is coming into number 10 going to be a bed of roses? Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Camilla Tominey. And me, Jacob Rees-Mogg.

1:22Jacob, can I channel the feelings of a very depressed nation today? and I want you to cheer me up because I've been really angry since I stormed out of the pub last night. I could not stay after we lost to Argentina. I didn't want to hear the post-match commentary. I certainly didn't want to see the Argentinians revelling in the faces of our own wonderful national side. I was cross. I woke up even angrier. I'm angry at Thomas Tuchel. I'm angry. I'm angry now. I'm bringing other, you know, like in a domestic dispute where the husband always says to the wife, now you're just bringing in other grievances that happened weeks ago.

2:03That's how I'm now feeling. I don't have those sorts of domestic disputes. Yeah, right, says the father of six, honestly. They all laugh politely at my jokes and say, yes, Peter, we think you're right. Peter. Peter and Mater. This is how I'm feeling. I'm just going to sum it up in a nutshell and you can try and make me feel better, right? Ben Stokes, probably the best England cricketer of his generation, is no longer playing test cricket. That depressed me initially. We've never had a better chance of winning this World Cup than now. And because of idiotic decision making, bottling. I mean, if Thatcher taught us anything, you don't bottle against Argentina.

2:43We could have won. We're literally snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. So it's an even worse defeat. It's not that we played badly. It's because the team was so mismanaged in the last half hour. We could all see it. Why couldn't the manager? That's annoyed me. Meanwhile, nobody's noticed, but we've got, frankly, a very average politician coming down from the north, thinking he's a king, he's not even a prince, with no policy platform at all, faced no parliamentary or indeed press scrutiny, suddenly being announced as the prime minister on Monday. Oh, great. Who are you? What do you stand for?

3:17Nobody has an answer to these questions. We've got the whole situation with Iran back in a mess. Ceasefire. What ceasefire? Straits of Hormuz closed. Bill's about to go up. Burnham's talking about taxing us more. There's a hosepipe ban just being put in place in my area of the home counties. Unless you're on benefits and then it doesn't apply. Indeed. I mean, what's wrong with Britain? Why are we so rubbish? We're not. We're a great nation. fine nation made up of fine people who have come back from disaster before from the ashes of disaster gray the roses of success to quote from chitty chitty bang bang and if you want some cheer Somerset got victory from the jaws of defeat against Yorkshire in the 2020 match yesterday we were 80 for eight and we got to 162 scoring at over 15 runs and over with 22 runs in the last over amazing performance by somerset that my maternal side of the family are all from yorkshire including a great grandfather that i think played for the county side but no matter somerset doing well somerset's relevant because when england was at its lowest point everything had gone wrong the danes were literally at our doorstep where was alfred the great he was on the somerset levels and he was working out how to win he won the battle of eddington and from there created england which led to the United Kingdom, America, Australia, and the constitutional settlement in India.

4:42Quite remarkable global achievement from despair and depression on the Somerset levels. So all I'd say is that we've been able to recover from much worse circumstances before, and we can do it again. We should have confidence in ourselves. We should look at what makes nations great and what is it. It's the pillars of our constitution. It's free speech, the rule of law, the rights of property, and democracy. And those four things have created a society where prosperity is possible. At the moment, we've allowed them to be gnawed away at by termites, by socialist termites. And when we get to 2029, I am very hopeful that we will be able to exterminate the socialist termites and have a proper conservative government that will reinforce the constitution, will take proper decisions.

5:34I can't promise we'll win the football. That's slightly outside the control of politicians. But that we can make this country great again. I don't think it's impossible. It just requires will and backbone. Andy Burnham decides to give his one and only interview to Gary Lineker. In what way, in what world, on what galaxy is that meant to inspire confidence in the man that wants to run this great nation, that he chooses Gary Lineker, a man who had to leave the BBC in a degree of disgrace and who, last time I checked, is not a political journalist, even though he sees himself as one of the country's leading political commentators.

6:18I know very little about Mr Linklater. He's not somebody I'm associated to. I thought he was a firm of lawyers. Why didn't he give his interview to Jonathan Agnew? It would have been a much more incisive interview coming from Jonathan. I mean, why not do a sit down with Geoffrey Boycott while you're at it? But how does this compare to Rishi Sunak? So Rishi Sunak kissed hands on Wednesday morning. Do explain what that means, because it sounds dodgy. No, it doesn't. It does to the uninitiated. You mean with the king? What I mean is something that every reader and viewer of the Daily Telegraph has known since they were children that when a prime minister is appointed, he goes to the king, is received in audience.

7:01The king asks him if he can form a government. The prime minister says, yes, I can. He kisses hands on appointment. So he kissed hands on Wednesday morning. What was the next thing he had to do? Prime minister's questions. It was a Wednesday. Now, his team tried to persuade Liz Truss to do an extra PMQs, and she quite unstandardly said, well, you've just forced me out. You can try and well answer the questions. and that is what he did. And Burnham has run away from this. Well, what does that tell us? It tells you. I'm merely making this point because there's a correlation here. There's a correlation here between, frankly, what we saw last night, which was a lack of fighting spirit.

7:38And it's actually completely unfair. This is why I'm angry about it because it's unfair to the Bellinghams, the Canes, the Gordons and the others of that team that if they had been allowed to attack, I'm pretty certain would have scored a second goal. we would have been able to wave to the goodbye Argentinians, off you pop back to your nation which by the way does not include the Falklands and carry on into the final and I wouldn't have minded if we'd gone off and lost to Spain because I actually quite like the Spanish so do most of our summer holidays there if we are not like the Rees-Moggs who resolutely turn away from the sun in the months of July and August We beat the Spanish once and for all in 1588 we don't necessarily always need to do it again But Burnham's emblematic of this kind of, I'm sorry, but it's mediocrity masquerading as magic I think for me, certainly to be a football pundit and to question tactics of the manager would be absurd Don't worry, most of us aren't football managers And most people watching that match could have employed better tactics than the actual manager I hope people are sitting down because as a politician I'm going to admit to complete ignorance I could not advise the football manager on what his tactics ought to be nor can I judge them retrospectively.

8:51I simply don't know enough about it. In terms of fighting spirit, I think it's just an arrogance of the blob that they think they can install somebody without any say-so from voters, without any debate, without any campaign in the Labour Party. They did it with Gordon Brown. That didn't work very well. We did it with Rishi Sunak. That didn't work very well. Bringing in new leaders without any proper mandate is not a way to run this country. No. And it's enormously arrogant of Labour and of Labour backbenchers, the hypocrisy of that standing ovation. Wasn't that the most cringeworthy thing? At Prime Minister's question.

9:29And all those people... They all hate him. They've stabbed him in the back and then they clap him out. They pretend that they love him. It was so bogus. But Parliament is a sham like that. You know, we had people paying tribute to Anne Whittacombe yesterday who frankly had tweeted the most appalling things about her while she was alive. This is also why we lose faith. We lose faith in the system if the system is itself seemingly, frankly, a little bit like FIFA, sort of riddled with contradiction and at times it seems corruption. I mean, do we take something from the game that we behave more? This is what we always do as English.

10:04we've got frankly a cravingly cheating Argentinian team who later emerge with a sign saying the Malvinas Islands are ours well the correct name for them is the Falkland Islands and they absolutely aren't yours it's absolutely a craven breach of the FIFA rules on not politicising football nothing's done who knows whose pocket the referee was in we've had this bizarre situation with Infantino and Donald Trump cancelling red cars We can't even have faith in the system that then turns against us in a match. Our players are repeatedly getting fouls. They're not getting fouls found by the referee or indeed free kicks.

10:44I know I sound like I'm going on about my new shy. And the best that the English can do can say to themselves, well, we behaved better on the pitch. Who cares? We didn't win. So we're much more polite. Great. We've got that in our arsenal. British people, very polite, mind their P's and Q's, but just lose stuff. We're now going to be very polite about a guy in a black t-shirt with some mascara on, apparently being the next messiah, when he's just another naughty socialist boy like the rest of them. First of all... Calm down. It's not English to complain about the result. Play up, play up and play the game.

11:18That is the English approach. And it is, what is it? Expect the worst, hope for the best and accept the result. We got the result. There's no good meaning about it now. No. There's another set of matches in four years' time. We can worry about it then. This has happened. The Euros are in two years' time on home. But they're less interesting. Well, no. The World Cup is proper. Yes. The Euros. Right, right. Anything with European in it I'm not so keen on. The World Cup is important and perhaps interesting even to non-football followers. But we've just got to accept the result and grow up. And stiff upper lip, Camilla, stiff upper lip.

11:55but let's get some good old robin starch and apply it. I'm going to get over this in a minute. To be fair to Keir Starmer, who has tried to secure some kind of legacy in the last 48 hours of his premiership, popping off to Ukraine, now he's said this about this extraordinary display by these Argentinian players. He's hit back at the team for holding up a Falklands are Argentine banner and said the World Cup might not have been ours, but the Falkland Islands are. What about the Tragos Islands, which he was desperate to give away. Now you're trying to depress me again. I'm trying to be upbeat. Burnham also wants to give away these Chagos Islands.

12:32If Burnham wants to get a little bounce in popularity, he will cancel the Chagos decision. It's one of the stupidest decisions that Starmer made with his very unsatisfactory attorney general, who seemed to be a complete quizzling, Lord Hermer, who wanted to give everything away, never wanted to stand up for British interests, always thought that foreign law should trump British law. It was a disastrous approach to take. And Burnham would get his innings off to a good start, would score a few early runs if he announced on Monday that the Chagos deal was like the dodo. Indeed. What do we make of this whole HMS Medway story?

13:08So Argentina has accused a British warship of making a, quote, illegal incursion into its waters hours after the World Cup semifinal. Pablo Cuerno, Argentina's foreign minister, said HMS Medway was making an unconsulted and illegal journey through Argentine territorial waters, accusing the Royal Navy of military incursion. Well, first of all, it's very encouraging to know that we've got a ship. Yes. Didn't know we have three. One that's working. Medway as well as Dragon. Isn't that absolutely miraculous? Secondly, it depends on their definition of waters and what's their waters and what's our waters.

13:44So I wouldn't automatically believe a story from an Argentinian propagandist. No, that's correct. On Burnham, back to Burnham then, because we're going to get onto in the second half of this podcast talking about who might be the next chancellor. So we have him wanting to continue to give away the Chagos Islands, even though Donald Trump has said the deal is dead and the Tories have found some ancient international treaty, which is the only piece of international law Lord Hermer and Keir Starmer appear to want to ignore, which is extraordinary. We've then got this, again, rather depressing statement on Gaza.

14:17We didn't get our response to Israel's response to October the 7th right. What did he mean by it? What didn't we get right? This is a really serious problem for Burnham because it raises all the issues that Starman was, to be fair to him, good on about reaching out anti-Semitism from the Labour Party. Yes. And there's one of the things he mentioned at the dispatch box yesterday. day, if Burnham is backtracking on that and backtracking on support for Israel after Israelis were brutally murdered, raped and murdered by Palestinian terrorists, then I think he will reopen the whole issue about whether the Labour Party is an anti-Semitic party.

14:54I mean, basically, he was trying to rail against Starmer initially saying to LBC that Israel had a right to defend itself. Which it obviously does. Of course it does. No wonder he goes then and sits stand with Gary Lineker. Then as well, we've got him. How do we think he's going to get on with Trump? We discussed this a little bit yesterday when you and I mooted the notion that Keir Starmer might be a wise appointment as the foreign secretary. We don't think that will happen. We don't know. I don't think it will happen. Poor old Yvette Cooper. Because I'm now thinking, actually, Burnham thinks he's going to ride a crest of a wave of Royal Britannia.

15:28He was hoping that England would win this World Cup or at least get into the final for the first time in 60 years. that hasn't happened. We've now got the Iran deal, I mean, torn to shreds. So he's again, got to cope with this blockage in the Strait of Hormuz. We've got Trump saying we're going to apply tariffs and then quickly rescinding that because clearly shipping companies and the rest of the Western world said, what are you talking about? So he's going to inherit a very difficult economic legacy that some future chancellor is going to have to unpick. Again, getting onto that in a minute, he's actually going to come into power on Monday in a much less strong position than he perhaps had hoped.

16:05Yes, indeed. He must have hoped that the straightforward was open and that therefore prices were coming down a bit and therefore interest rates could come down, cutting the cost of government borrowing, giving a little bit of extra headroom over the Reeves headroom. And that would mean that he wouldn't have to raise taxes or cut spending, that now looks, in the short term at any rate, unlikely. I still think it's possible that Trump's Iran policy may work more than seems likely now. I wouldn't lose all hope on that. But yes, it's going to be a difficult inheritance and none of the problems have gone away.

16:40You will have seen today that an immigration tribunal, the senior tribunal, ruled that some Palestinian can bring in 18 family members under human rights law who the Home Secretary had refused. The lower tribunal said that they could come in. The Home Office appealed. And the higher tribunal said, no, no, human rights mean that 18 people could come in. And this is utter madness. It opens the floodgates potentially. But will he legislate to do anything about that? Will he amend the Human Rights Act to stop this happening? Well, almost certainly not, because his Labour backbenchers won't vote for it.

17:14So will he do anything about the burgeoning welfare bill? Will he risk putting up the pension age, which they're thinking about but haven't made a decision on? All these problems are still there. And Burnham won't answer questions, won't give any indication of what he thinks. And all he's done is give people cheap buses in Manchester. That's his limit of his experience. Why do Palestinians and their dependents want to come here when we're Israel-loving Zionists? That's a very good question, probably because I'm afraid this country is not as pro-Jewish community as it ought to be. It's not a question of Zionism, but I know Jewish people in this country are very worried about their safety in this country nowadays.

17:58We've gone through what's in the intray for Andy Byrne when it comes to domestic and foreign matters, but what about economic ones and who might he pick as his next Chancellor?

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18:54They think it's a sham. The Diamond King, a new podcast from The Telegraph. With me, Mick Brown. and me, Robert Mendick. Out now.

19:10It's a fundamental question. The most effective governments work when the Chancellor and the Prime Minister get on extraordinarily well and trust each other. They may not make all the right decisions, that's a separate matter, but purely from governance point of view, Cameron and Osborne worked brilliantly. They never briefed against each other. They may have had disagreements, but they were always private. They worked like a horse and carriage. Now, with Brown and Blair, the opposite was true. And it was very damaging, created great uncertainty, economically damaging and politically damaging.

19:47What we're reading at the moment is that Burnham has to have a woman because he's got a woman problem. This is completely stupid and also offensive to the women that he might choose because actually Shabana Mahmood is a very capable person. She may be the right choice on economic grounds and on Clasinister Burnham grounds. But if she now gets it, everyone will say, well, that's a DEI hire. So her standing has been downgraded by this discussion. Yes. Why was it pre-briefed? Just announce these things rather than pitch rolling for them. Because people around a leader can't resist the temptation to sound important when talking to journalists and say they allow these things to go out.

20:25And the spads around the individuals who are being mentioned brief it in the hope of boosting their boss's chances. There seem to me to be two qualifications for the chancellor to make it really work. One is very high intelligence bordering on intellectual arrogance, because you need somebody who will tell the treasury what to do. So Rishi was not a good chancellor in the end, because though he's highly intelligent, he didn't have sufficient intellectual arrogance to overrule the Treasury. And therefore he went along with Treasury Nostrums, which I think he now recognises a lot of them were wrong.

21:01That's weird because I'm just going to interject there and think about your fellow alumni at the old Etonian quasi-kwarteng. I thought he did have a degree of intellectual arrogance, but actually that proved to be his and Liz Truss's undoing. Well, unlike Nigel Lawson, who had the intelligence and the intellectual arrogance, Nigel did it all in an orderly way with a well-thought-through plan, whereas Liz and Kwasi went at it like a bullet a gate. So you need an element of patience. They've got three years, so that gives them a bit of time to think it through. So it needs to be somebody intelligent with intellectual arrogance who is very, very close to the Prime Minister.

21:38Those are the conditions you need for a competent Chancellor. And actually the best person in those terms isn't available. It'd be Ed Balls, who I know was close to Burnham in the past, is an intelligent man and definitely has oodles of intellectual arrogance. But the trouble is Ed Balls isn't currently in the Labour government. In fact, he's currently on daytime television. Ed Balls isn't available. The other problem for Burnham, by the way, is if he does get the Home Secretary to become the Chancellor, who's the Home Secretary? Because Mahmood was very well placed to push through the immigration reforms.

22:11That's absolutely right. And that's the other thing prime ministers need to remember is that if they've got a good minister in place, that's worth its weight in gold. There are never that many good cabinet ministers. So if you've got somebody who's really doing what you want, keep that person there, even if that person is desperate for promotion. The other candidate much discussed is Ed Miliband. Now, Miliband is an extremely intelligent man. He certainly has the intellectual arrogance. I don't know that he is close to Burnham personally, so I don't know whether that part of it would work. And the bit that absolutely wouldn't work is that his intellectual arrogance is so off the scale that it would be catastrophic, as we've seen with Net Zero.

22:54He converts that zealotry to... That's right. That's right. It goes beyond where it's effective to implementing absolutely nutty policies. Also, it'll be highly instructive when it comes to the future direction of this Burnham government to see who he appoints as chancellor with regard to whether he's leaning into red Labour, Miliband, or blue Labour, Mahmoud. Now, he could have Mahmood by his side, although he could also have West Streeting by his side and probably keep the blue labourites marginally more happy than having a lefty at the Treasury in Miliband or A &Other. Streeting, I think, meets the first criterion that he is intelligent.

23:40I think he absolutely doesn't meet the third criterion, which is that he would be a loyal and dutiful supporter of the prime minister. He is a supreme operator. It'd be like pointing, not quite Peter Mandelson, but somebody who is an absolute operator and who would always be looking out for his own chance. And therefore I'd be very cautious if I were Burnham about putting somebody like that into the Treasury. I once described West Streeting as the most ambitious man, not just in the Labour Party, but the country. and he didn't disabuse me of that notion. In fact, he heard the description before he came on air on GB News and almost revelled in it.

24:19Yes. Which tells you everything you need to know about West Streeting. That's right. So, yes, high office for Streeting. He's not without ability, but definitely not for Chancellor. We haven't mentioned Yvette Cooper. Well, should we? You mentioned her husband. Yvette Cooper. I think it would be Rachel Reeves Mark II in my view. I mean, Yvette Cooper, I find. She wouldn't cry. She wouldn't cry, no. She's tougher. She is tough. I mean, she's unsmiling and unblinking at times, a little like her husband's slightly... Can I use the word odd? Yeah, I'm going to. Can I also just say back to the original nature of this conversation?

24:58We are weighing up mediocrity here. I think it's a problem for the right as well, by the way. I think this is just generally a problem that as the great reputation of this nation has diminished, so too have its public servants. And actually maybe we have had a string of inadequate prime ministers because back in the day when Britannia ruled the waves we had such an enormous presence on the world stage that attracted people of enormous character in Churchill and Thatcher and even some of the leaders on the left. And now because we have been somewhat diminished and I don't like talking about this because I love Britain and everything it stands for and I'm not one of these quitters who are like I'm going off to the Middle East.

25:41I would never do that. But because our standing has diminished, so too has the standing of the people that run this country. I couldn't disagree with you more. Right. Well, who do you think has been distinguished post Thatcher and Blair? You're assuming far too much distinction historically. You're forgetting all the forgettable prime ministers. You're forgetting Wilmington. You're forgetting Boot. You're forgetting Lord North, you're forgetting how long do you want me to go on for? You're forgetting the one who cried the whole time and George IV had to get rid of him, whose name momentarily escapes me.

26:21Aberdeen, who was hopeless, Roseberry, who was hopeless, Ramsay MacDonald, Bonner Law, or all these undistinguished figures who have passed out of our recognition because we only remember the Walpoles, the Pitts, the Disraelis, Gladstone, I think he was hopeless, the Palmerstons. We remember the great figures from the past and we say, it was always like that. No, it wasn't. And most years, we had a mediocre prime minister, even when we ruled a quarter of the globe. and that's what we need to remember and likewise with Chancellor of the Exchequer how many brilliant chancellors can I name? I can name three Go on, name them before Lawson I would go for Pitt the Younger Yes I would go for Gladstone who is a brilliant chancellor but not a good prime minister and oddly Neville Chamberlain Right For some reason you suggesting that we've always been average is making me feel better You're cheering me up a bit Jacob Bismog But go through the kings and queens of England.

27:24How many great kings have we had? Yes, there's William the Conqueror, and yes, there's Henry II, and Henry I, probably. But there's also Stephen, who's utterly useless, and Henry III, and John, and Richard, and Edward II, and Richard II. And we're a great country in spite of our government, not because of it. We're a great country because of our governmental systems and our constitution and the underlying brilliance of the English yeoman. Not because we've got a fantastic governing class who always does brilliant things. So are you saying that, can I just distill this into a single line, because I'm a craven journalist who's just interested in headlines, that because of the indomitable spirit of the British people, we will overcome.

28:08is that what you're saying? Again, let's get back to history. I started with Alfred the Great in 878. I mentioned in passing 1588, the Armada. Overwhelming odds against us. What about Blenheim, the odds against defeating Louis XIV in the early 18th century, then standing alone against Napoleon, who we defeat twice in 1805 at sea and 1815 at land, the Second World War, when America may have won the Second World War, but there'd be no Second World War to win if we hadn't fought alone in 1940. Our history indicates that we are absolutely fantastic at pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. Look at Margaret Thatcher in 1979, years before you were born, when the country was going to be...

28:53It was a year after I was born. Years before the childlike Camilla was born. Certainly centuries after you were born. Decades and millennia probably. But at that point, the country was going down the tubes. We were becoming like one of the Soviet allied countries with no economy, endless strikes, no ability to govern ourselves, hopelessness. And she changed it. And we can do that again. We should be so excited about our country's future. I'm excited. There's a real opportunity. I'm just having a bad day. We don't have a bad day. Like most of the nation. Like most of the nation. In a way, the worse it gets, the better the opportunities are because we're only ready for big change when things are difficult.

29:33When everything's going along about all right, we're jogging along all right, and the scones still have their jam, their cream, and their butter on it to keep everybody happy. We think life's fine, and we don't need to take tough decisions. When unemployment's rising, inflation is rising, the national debt is out of control, we're losing at association football, we're threatened in our remaining territories overseas, we've given in to the EU over Gibraltar, we have a government that doesn't know which way is up. that's when you get to people saying well actually we need a pretty fundamental change we need some proper conservative ideas we need some free markets we need to stand up for our great history for our nation, for our island story for all that we believe in and we stood for and I think we are within touching distance of that and I think even better is that the right is getting its act together because of force majeure Can I just say thank goodness for your mogalogs you've really cheered me up now I would start singing Land of Hope and Glory, but I think the country has suffered enough.

30:34We will be reunited in hopeful harmony tomorrow as we react to Andy Burnham being crowned the new leader of the Labour Party. As Dame Vera Lynn didn't say, we'll meet again, do know where, do know when. 5pm.

31:00Thank you.

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