Vacuous and vague: Inside Andy Burnham’s speech of empty promises

0:04The Telegraph.

0:08It's the moment no one has been waiting for except Andy Burnham as today he's unveiled as the next Labour leader before becoming Prime Minister on Monday. But it's rather like the man I met upon the stair who wasn't there. As far as I would tell there was nothing in his speech at all. It was empty, vacuous and void. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Camilla Tomini. And me, Jacob Rees-Mogg.

0:41Jacob, lovely to see you on this Friday as Andy Burnham has become the Labour leader. He's going to, and you love using this phrase, kiss hands with the King on Monday. But in the meantime, a wonderful love-in, a Labour love-in in London, where he gave a speech which, as far as I can tell, didn't have very much in it at all. No, it didn't. I thought the five points were utterly vacuous. With political speeches, if somebody says, I've got five points and the precise opposite would be meaningless, then there's no point in making those five points. Now imagine a leader who stood up and said, I want to build a culture of division in my party.

1:20Nobody would say that. So his first point is simply OTOs. And then his mantra, which he goes on about, about devolution. Well, the problem with devolution is that it very often doesn't actually work. So he didn't inspire, he didn't really inspire even his own room, I thought, his own room of supporters. And I'm afraid he was fundamentally dishonest in his tribute to Kirstama and his call to stop briefing against one another when he and Lucy Powell were their lead briefers against Starmer. Burnham turned up at the last Labour Party conference, made a bit of a twit of himself, actually, to campaign against Starmer.

2:03Yes, exactly. We should all be lovey-dovey and hugger-mugger when he was the man who ousted his predecessor. There was echoes of the hypocrisy involved in the standing ovation for Starmer at PMQs on Wednesday. As you say, his deputy leader, who got the job precisely because she wanted to engineer him out and indeed Andy Burnham in. That's how Bridget Philipson, who is more of a Starmer ally, was sidelined during that particular race. She came on and started praising him for everything he'd done, while at the same time saying, people are crying out for change. And this is what I also couldn't understand from Andy Burnham's speech.

2:39Forgive me, but Labour, I believe, have been in power now for two years. And Andy Burnham is standing on a stage, in one hand, praising Keir Starmer for all he's achieved, and on the other hand saying that Britain is in decline, that everything must change, that the North has been left behind. One wonders whether he understands what year he's in, Jacob, because I appreciate that the righties do face this criticism that they remain completely obsessed with Thatcher nearly half a century on from when she first took power in 1979. But isn't Burnham obsessed with Thatcher? Why is he going back to the 1970s and acting as if it was a land of milk and honey, saying that everything went wrong in the 1980s when I believe we have the highest growth rate of all of recent memory in Britain, and third of all, when it is 2026.

3:30I mean, he chooses a new order hit from 1987 to exit stage very much left, by the way, because let's be honest, this was an unashamedly socialist speech. Is this guy in some kind of time warp? It's very odd, isn't it? Because people like me, look back and admire Margaret Thatcher in the same way as we look back and admire Churchill, Palmerston, or Disraeli, or Pitt the Younger, etc., etc. We're not looking back and saying what she did has an immediate consequence today. Things have moved on. We had 13 years of a Labour government between then and now, 14 years of crypto-conservative government as well, but periods in coalition.

4:11It's ridiculous to say the problems of the country relate to decisions made in 1979 before many people, including you, were even thought of, let alone born. Jacob, I've just remembered the name of the New Order song. It's True Faith, which I'm sure you bopped along to in the 1980s. And he tried to sing along to it, apparently, according to Tony Diver, who's reporting on all this, everyone must read. It will be on the Telegraph website and in the paper tomorrow. But, I mean, just let's... I'm going to say let's go through the nuts and bolts of this, but let's be perfectly honest. There weren't really very many.

4:45So the five promises, as you've alluded to, are build a culture of one Labour team, work to build a new politics, whatever that means, change Labour's political direction. I presume that means in a further leftwards direction. Be a leader for everywhere in the UK, the North, the South, the East and the West, for Scotland, Wales and for Northern Ireland. And then fifth, take power back from Westminster and Whitehall, quotes, to give it to the place where you live. This is all very vague, isn't it? Partly vacuous, as it's announced on the day they say they're going to abolish Rutland again and divide up Kent.

5:25So they're not giving back to places where you live. They're giving back to bureaucratic boundaries that they've decided upon. And number four is they're such rubbish. Which prime minister ever said, I'm not going to be a leader for the whole country, I'm just going to be a leader for West Hartree or something like that? I mean, it's utterly vacuous. There is no meaning to it, no substance to it, no indication of how he's going to operate as a prime minister. But isn't this really disturbing when the one criticism that has been made of Keir Starmer from the very beginning is that despite all of those years in opposition, he came into Downing Street without a plan.

6:01I mean, that has been central to those who say he's been undone so quickly in two years precisely because he has wavered because he hasn't had any ideological heft. He hasn't stood on a manifesto of clear thinking and carried it through his term and what was left of it. Similarly, Andy Burnham's doing this thing. And let's actually use the clip where he talks about the joke that is told about him. For the uninitiated, we have told the joke many times on the Daily Tea. It's this joke about a Starmorite, a Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite walk into a bar in Manchester and the barman says, hello Andy.

6:39This is how he reacted to that joke doing the rounds in Westminster. In future, when a Burnamite walks into a bar... LAUGHTER As many Burnamites are known to do. Talking about you, Kevin. In future, when a Burnhamite walks into a bar, I want the barman to say, great to see you, we don't like factional politics in here. Now you might know, and your reaction suggests so, there's a different version of that joke told by people who put internal politics before anything else. But here's the truth. Their factionalism has bedeviled us. Today we move beyond it. I have supported all our Labour leaders in my lifetime because I believe a united Labour party and Labour movement is the best hope for our country.

7:37And I know you believe that too, as do our members up and down the land. I mean, I admire the wishful thinking of it, Jacob, that you can basically be any kind of labourite anybody wants you to be. But isn't this going to turn out to be a case of if somebody is something to all men, he's actually nothing to anyone? I think you're absolutely right. I quite liked his turning the joke on the barman on himself. I thought that showed a self-deprecating humour, which you can't imagine Keir Starmer having done. But he was deeply disloyal to Starmer. So it's not even true that he is this loyal Labour figure.

8:19He wasn't. He isn't. But the other thing I'd say is I'm really very worried economically, because we are repeating the mistake that Rachel Reeves made. So they won in July 2024. And they then waited to have the budget until October. You therefore had months of uncertainty, economic uncertainty, people not knowing what taxes would change, making economic decisions, avoiding investing in the UK because they didn't know the direction in which taxation was going to go. And all sorts of things were briefed, as is happening now, that risked making things significantly worse for investment in this country.

8:56And that had a profound economic effect. To do this a second time within two years is utterly irresponsible. We don't know who the Chancellor will be, but even worse than that, whoever it is, we don't know whether there will be an increase in capital gains tax, whether there'll be a new land value tax. How is this going to be funded and afforded? And this uncertainty is very economically damaging. Yes, I recorded a video yesterday just having a look at the economic legacy that he inherits. I mean, forget the Tories' economic legacy, which Starmer spent most of his premiership banging on about, along with global headwinds, in a bid to disguise the damage caused by two budgets, which has added£62 billion to the tax bill.

9:43So he inherits inflation at 2.8%, not the 2 % target that they were all banging on about. Let's be honest, sclerotic growth. Rachel Reeves had put the House on growth and we haven't had it. He's banging on about Thatcher. In every year that she was Prime Minister, there was 2.6 % growth in this country. Imagine it now. Imagine that. Any politician in Westminster would give their eye teeth for it. We've got youth unemployment at record high, one in six 18 to 24-year-olds expecting to be neat, not in education or employment over the next four years unless urgent action is taken. We've got the tax take at a record high of 38.5 % of GDP.

10:24Consider that. So we're paying ever higher taxes for what? A broken public service system. Oh and by the way we're splurging £1 billion a day Jacob A day on welfare So he can come in promising beer and skittles And it's all going to be great fun And talking about being consensual He wants to have a consensus We'll get onto his joke in a minute About what uniform we'll be wearing And whether or not Kemi Bade not lights it or not But this bloke is going to be faced With a catalogue of extremely difficult decisions Oh, and by the way, lo and behold, he's not even become Prime Minister officially.

11:04And we've got the likes of Labour backbenchers like Rachel Maskell, who is an inveterate rebel, constantly railing against any cut in spending or any cut in borrowing, already piping up, talking about all the stuff he needs to add to the benefits bill. It's all cloud cuckoo land. They're going to have to cut spending and they're either going to have to do it in an orderly fashion or as some economic emergency within the next couple of years, that taxation at 38.5 % is as high as it will get. But the British people don't pay much more than 38 % of GDP in taxation in their modern history, indeed in any of their history.

11:46And taxation is by consent. If you make tax rates too high, people change their behavior. They simply work less, or they get rid of assets, they move assets abroad, they leave the country in the extreme cases. And the people who leave the country are the people with the most assets. So putting taxes up is not going to raise more money. Spending more is going to increase the deficit. We're already spending over£100 billion a year on debt interest. And interest rates have been going up recently in the long end of the market. So he faces difficulties created by Starmer and Reeves, which he has no plan to deal with.

12:23And you're quite right, Rachel Maskell will represent quite a strong view within the party and they're expecting him to govern from the left. We've already had people say that Shabana Mahmood should not be Chancellor because she's too dangerously right-wing. Well if they think she's right-wing I can't think what they want. It would be disastrous economically to have a very left-wing Chancellor. Also let's just talk about the lack of scrutiny again today. So we've got the speech in central London, Journalists are there, but there's no Q &A session. There's then a little later a speech to Labour activists in the South East.

13:00Again, no real scrutiny. So, so far we've had him chatting to that titan of political commentary, Gary Lineker. We've had him do some kind of Reddit question and answer session, which his team condensed into two and a half minutes, keeping all the best bits and dispensing with the others. we haven't had any full press conference probing his ideas and then his response to that is to suggest he's a sort of man of the people politician who doesn't mind getting his ideas from Greggs that was part of the speech now I know you're partial to a chocolate eclair from Greggs but but it's very easy to get your ideas from people that love you in Greggs it's very easy isn't it to sort of like be in the melee of not really facing very fierce questioning or criticism at all and just riding on the wave of your own Manchester popularity.

13:49But if you were a politician of the people, you'd actually be answering really serious questions, facing really serious scrutiny from day one, wouldn't you? Of course. And you would ask, who does he think he is? He is not prime minister by divine right. He is prime minister in a democratic country. He needs like the ancient Romans at their triumphs to have somebody whispering in his here, remember you are mortal, that he seems to think that he is not mortal. But if I were him, I would look at that standing ovation that Sir Keir Starmer got when he finished being Prime Minister's last session of PMQs and think those selfsame people who have just nominated me are now applauding Starmer.

14:34Their support is skin deep. It is not deep-rooted support for me and for my policies and for my ideology and for my ambition for the country. It is support for their immediate jobs and electoral prospects. And if I don't deliver, they will turn on me too. And to deliver, he needs to set out where he's going, argue for it and persuade people. Who is he persuading today? And this leaves a vacuum because if he's not making the case to be the Labour leader, to be the Prime Minister, to lead our country to the broad sunlit uplands, then it leaves the vacuum for us to fill by saying that he is an empty vessel.

15:17He is sound and sure that signifies nothing.

15:24Nirav Modi was a billionaire diamond tycoon whose jewellery was worn by Hollywood stars like Kate Winslet. But in 2018, he was accused of masterminding one of the world's biggest ever bank frauds, and he disappeared. This is the extraordinary story of the rise and fall of Nirav Modi and of how we caught him. He was in the news all the time. Where is Nirav Modi? Why can we not find it? He's one of the most sought-after criminals in India. You owe a lot of people a lot of money, Mr Modi, who would very much like to know where you are. Sorry, no comment. The Indians will think we're a laughingstock.

16:05Here we are seven years later still speaking about this case. I think it's a sham. The Diamond King, a new podcast from The Telegraph. With me, Mick Brown. And me, Robert Mendick. Out now.

16:24He's staked a great deal personally on this election. I mean, he's made it very much about him. Let's listen to his line about Andy's for us. You might call it faint praise, but I took it as very serious praise. Someone said recently, Andy's all right. He's for us. I was so proud of that, that I made it my slogan in Makerfield. And I want people to say once again that Labour are for us. I want that to just fall off people's tongues and we can do it. We can be that party, the party that puts more power in people's hands, drives good growth in every postcode and puts hope in every heart, that gets the country pulling together again and moves beyond the divisions of recent years.

17:16This was very apparent in Makerfield for the by-election. It was all kind of emoji images of him. He's kind of become a caricature almost. He's become this kind of, it's the myth and the man and the legend, which is actually very contrary to Keir Starmer's approach, because Keir Starmer was all about, I'm here in a government of service rather than self-service. whereas there's a personalisation to this campaign which I think is interesting. But then again, here comes the contradiction. I mean, he made a joke about how he's going to be spending the summer, I think, on some kind of walking tour, which, by the way, will include the South.

17:52He's saying that he's a Prime Minister for everywhere. But speaking as a Southerner, if I may, I mean, I know I'm not allowed to because apparently I'm bathing in gold leaf here and enjoying the trappings of immense wealth in a cost of living crisis, but whatever. I think he's actually stoking a Northside divide, which has closed markedly over the course of the last four decades. He keeps on banging on about Thatcherism and Toryism. Well, hang on a minute. Wasn't it Lord Heseltine, the Tory minister, that reinvigorated the Liverpool docks? Wasn't it George Osborne who ploughed four billion quid into Manchester?

18:31Wasn't it actually Tory council leaders that led a lot of the regeneration of his big city that he now takes credit for. So, again, you know, he's kind of doing the opposite because I now feel that there are going to be tensions. I feel that the home counties and the middle classes of the South think that there's a them and us situation. I think that they do agree there's a them and us situation. The South paying for improvements to the North. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, and this will create a discontent. It will make the taxpayers in the South feel they're paying for everything and they're not getting things in return.

19:08Bear in mind, only London and the Southeast are net contributors to the Exchequer. All the other regions of the United Kingdom are net recipients from the Exchequer. And you're also absolutely spot on that the regeneration of Manchester and the regeneration of Liverpool were done by central government. They may have sometimes worked through local people, but it was not a local effort. This is not 19th century Birmingham with Joe Chamberlain. This is central government deciding that that's a main aim of policy. I think all this devolution stuff is crackpot, actually. We are a unitary country. Devolution has been a disaster for Scotland and Wales, and most people think that London is run astonishingly badly by Sir Sadiq Khan.

19:53Also, there was something kind of... It seemed to me to be very anti-democratic about the way that Lucy Powell and Shabana Mahmoud and others kind of announced him as the new Labour leader, completely unopposed. There's been no leadership contest. I mean, to use a footballing analogy, this is a fixture that nobody really asked for, I mean, beyond some people within the Labour Party and the movement itself in junking Starmer. But let's not forget that this man has not got an illustrious history when it comes to even becoming leader. Let's not forget Jacob in 2010, He lost that Labour leadership to Ed Miliband.

20:31He came fourth out of five with 10 % of the vote. That's how popular he was back there. And that is critical because that was following the period that he was actually a minister and he was at the heart of the Blair government. 2015, he lost to Jeremy Corbyn, came second with 19%. So clearly they preferred his unique brand of socialism to Andy Burnham's. Don't forget as well, he served as Shadow Home Secretary under Jeremy Corbyn. I mean, David Blair's written a really good piece about this whole distancing himself from Keir Starmer's initial defence of Israel's attack back on Hamas after October 7th.

21:06Blair has written this extremely popular piece with the Delegraph audience, basically saying he's become a laughingstock on the global stage and he's not even become prime minister yet. I mean, this isn't a particularly illustrious history. This appears to me to be the promotion of complete and utter mediocrity, I've got to be honest. Yes, he's smiling. Yes, he can tell a joke. Yes, he's personable. That doesn't necessarily make a prime minister, does it? No, and he can't deliver a speech either that lifts the mood of the country, that if you compare his oratory with that of Neil Kinnock, who was in the audience, or Boris Johnson, there was no sense that this was an important figure raising the tone of the political debate.

21:46It was a pretty routine political speech that could have been given in a village hall on a Friday evening after a not very well-subscribed dinner. it wasn't the pith and moment that we need from a prime minister in waiting. I think we're absolutely spot on. And the criticism of what Keir Starmer did about Israel should worry us greatly because the one achievement Starmer had was to root out the bulk of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party. And I think Burnham is opening the door for it to come back. I think he's looking to reunite the left, to bring back the Greens, to bring back the Palestinian mob, and therefore I think this is going to be very unfortunate for the Jewish community in this country.

22:30Let's have a look at the other hints that he gave to policy, because he wasn't really forthright in anything apart from going over old ground, to be perfectly honest. So we've made the devolution point in this whole idea that Westminster and Whitehall doesn't work for the north and therefore needs to be completely overhauled. On water and energy, he says he wants all parts of the UK taking, quote, greater public control of the water and energy sectors, having advocated for public ownership of Thames water. Has he got a point there, Jacob? Because let's be honest, nothing infuriates Telegraph readers more than water companies giving their bosses fat cat bonuses and then polluting our rivers and seas.

23:09They pollute our rivers and seas much, much, much less than they did when they were under public ownership, when they polluted our rivers and seas so much that they didn't keep any figures on it. Okay. The sewage fell into the sea about 20 yards out that you would then be swimming in. So when the tide came in, the poo came in with it. Oh, God. And that was prior to privatisation. Privatisation has led to billions, tens of billions being spent to improve the treatment of sewage. And now sewage only goes into the sea, not as a matter of routine, but when there's very heavy rainfall. You have a choice of whether you spend tens of billions of pounds on ensuring that when there's heavy rainfall, no sewage spills into the sea, or whether you accept that that is a risk that is worth taking and is proportionate because of the cost of stopping it happening, being exorbitant.

24:00And the cost always falls on consumers. Yes. The other thing to bear in mind about electricity is that the reason our electricity is expensive is because of crazy net zero policies. That's what's making our electricity both expensive and unreliable. But as Claire Cortina keeps on pointing out, it almost crashed when we had a few hot days because the system got close to overloading and failing. This is really serious. And that's the failure of government policy, not of the privatized electricity companies. So this approach to nationalization is utterly balmy and goes against all the evidence. And the trains, The trains are rubbish now they've been renationalised.

24:44Yeah. Privatisation led to a phenomenal increase in train journeys. But it's just unionist catnip, isn't it? I mean, this is just like a socialist bingo card. What else have we got? I want to build more council housing. Ka-ching, yeah. Which socialist leader doesn't? Immigration needs to fall further, but no specific target, no detail on that. Of course, he wants to see a fair and lasting reduction to the UK's welfare bill, but specific funding plans are yet to be set out. Again. Again, aspiration over actual detail. Tim Shipman on The Spectator quoted somebody within this whole movement saying, listen, it's high on vibes and low on detail.

25:21And I think you and I can agree with that analysis. Well, it only seems to be high on something. But it's worth adding he's also promised that he's going to deal with social care. I strongly encouraged Boris, when he was running his leadership campaign, to ensure that social care was the thing he managed to do in his first few weeks as prime minister. And that was the intention. It simply turned out to be much more difficult and much more expensive than the white papers issued by think tanks indicated. And therefore, it's turned out not to be possible to do. So we're getting easy glib promises that others have made before and have been found by events.

25:57Not that they fail to do them because of malevolence or because of dishonesty, but because the problem is very intractable. And there are competing demands on the public purse. and he should have made these promises as if it's all easy and it just isn't. The one chink of light for a lot of people on right and left is he's revealed that his father is suffering from Alzheimer's and therefore does want to do something about social care. Now, if that's true, I think that's to be welcomed because we've had complete and utter limbo on this since the Dilnot report. Theresa May tied herself in such knots about it that subsequent governments have basically not wanted to grasp the nettle.

26:36So let's just see where he is on that. Let's finish with some of Andy Burnham's for and against answers in this YouTube Q &A that he's done. Now, you can tell me, Jacob, whether you are for and against what Andy Burnham is for and against. What he is against. Single file queuing at the bar. Against, I agree with him. Playing loud things in public. I'm with him, I'm against that too. He's against a Yorkshire pudding on a Christmas dinner. I completely agree with him. Yorkshire pudding goes with roast beef. It doesn't go with turkey. I'll have a Yorkshire pudding whenever it's offered on any kind of roast.

27:18I like Yorkshire pudding very much, but it doesn't go with turkey. I'd just like to confirm that. OK. Clapping when the plane lands. Oh, dreadful. Odious. Appalling. Couldn't agree with him more. Voice notes. Voice notes. What are those? You know, you get your phone out and you start recording, Hello, this is Jacob Rees-Mogg on Friday morning. I'm just making some notes for the podcast for later. No, I don't do that, no. Or indeed sending a message. I much prefer saying, take a letter, Miss Moneypenny. Yes, indeed. Or I could, instead of writing a WhatsApp to you, I could send you a voice note that you then need to listen to.

27:52No, I don't like those. I do dictate messages, but then it types them up. I think that's perfectly all right. Also, you're doing that on one of those old-fashioned things with big reels of tape on them, aren't they? I know this. and you're listening to things on a wireless. Phones at gigs. Do you ever go to gigs? I'm not sure I know what a gig is. I thought it went with a pony. Right. We'll just move on from that one. Leaving the football early. Well, let's change it to leaving the cricket early. Jacob. I've always thought you'd go to cricket to enjoy yourself and if it's a very slow day and the sun is shining on you on the mound stand in Lords, you're entitled to go before the end to avoid the crowds.

28:32I wouldn't leave early on a one-day match, which is probably more akin to football. Thank you for that detailed answer. Now, this is what he is for. Oh, my goodness. Socks and sandals. I'm in favour of socks. I'm against sandals. I don't have a messiah complex. I don't wear sandals. No. Shoes off before you go into a house. Oh, I hate that. I think that's dreadful modern habit, foreign habit. Don't approve it at all. Really? I don't want to go to places where you smell people's feet. I think it's horrid. Yes, but hang on, I mean, that's so aristocratic. So you're quite happy for somebody to put on their hunter wellies and trail countryside mud through your living room?

29:15People usually change out of their boots, but no, that's fine. All right, now this is the most controversial of all. And this actually could finish his premiership before it's even started. He puts milk in the tea first. I know, I was asked about that by Martin Daubney on GB News yesterday. I don't often drink tea, but if you drink tea, inevitably the milk goes in at the end. Thank you so... I'm so glad you said that, because if you were going to say milk in first, our beautiful friendship that's built up over many years and has been consolidated on the daily tea, I would have to say I'm sorry I can't deal with you anymore.

29:56It's all over. But how wonderful. I find I'm in broad agreement on most things with Mr Burnham, So perhaps, you know people have been on at me about am I joining reform, perhaps the real answer is that I should be converting to Burnhamism. Well, I mean, what are the hopes of you ever converting to Burnhamism? We don't even know what it is. This is why you can be ambivalent. You don't actually know what you're signing up for. It's wonderful. He's against that terrible American habit of clapping when planes land, when somebody's just done his job routinely. So concluding thoughts, Jacob, this is a man who wants to make a difference but has delivered, in my mind, a speech completely lacking in substance.

30:34Yeah, I'm afraid so. You and I are not socialists. No. But we want the country to be well-governed. Whoever governs it, it's important we have good government. I feel this speech was a missed opportunity. Rather than setting out what his vision was, how he would govern, he's given a very down-market, cliche-ridden speech, lacking in inspiration. and I think that's a pity because I'd like a bit of inspiration and feeling of direction, even from a Labour Party politician. Tony Blair would have done it much better. Gordon Brown would have done it better. It's rather like John Major's speech to try and be balanced in a party political way about old maid cycling to Holy Communion.

31:17It's that type of, you know, really? Yeah. Damp squib. Right, Jacob, I'll let you change into your weekend leisure wear of another double-breasted suit, shirt and tie. Yes, I'm in pretty... It's blue suit, isn't it, I think, which is relatively informal compared to a grey one. You probably don't approve of my attire. I mean, I'm actually dressed for tennis, which I'll do later. Well, Wimbledon's over, so why are you dressed for tennis? I played a match last night. I'm playing a match tomorrow, Jacob. Oh, very good. I know. Who do I think I am? I hope you win. Thank you, chap. Have a lovely weekend.

31:55And it's been a delight doing the Daily Tea with you this week. Tim... It's been fun this week. It's been so fun. And you'll be back, I think, to cover other Tim Stanley holiday dates. And Tim and I will be back on Monday in Downing Street to see, to hail the arrival of the King of the North, 5pm.

32:25Thank you.