Could Andy Burnham replace Keir Starmer as PM?

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast. The thing is, the reality has been in the 10 years that I've done this job, whenever Westminster has kind of gone into a moment, I've somehow been drawn into it. And that has just been the reality. You've lived that reality with me. You've seen that happen. I can't ignore what's going on down there. But actually, to kind of directly come back to what you said, I've not kind of gone out there without any sort of, you know, just me on my own. People have been getting in touch with me. And obviously I've said to them, it's not a matter for me. This is ultimately a matter for the party in Westminster to decide.

0:45I am here to support the party in whatever way I can. That is Andy Burnham saying all this speculation about him taking over from Keir Starmer is nothing to do with him. But at the same time, he is doing absolutely nothing to dispel it. Is the Greater Manchester Mayor making a serious challenge to Keir Starmer's leadership? And if so, what is the plan? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:21The News Agents. It's John. It's Emily. It's Lewis. And sometimes you learn about leadership intentions from huddled corners, tiny whispers, little hints that might come from a putative leader's friends, allies, colleagues. But this is very different. This has come in the form of, for a start, a front page, a cover of a magazine, The New Statesman, a very long interview with Tom McTague. It's an extremely good interview, actually. And he really talks to Burnham about his intentions, his ideas, his policy, his leanings, where Andy Burnham espouses what he calls Manchesterism. This is the man who's been the mayor of Greater Manchester for nearly a decade now and talks about Manchesterism being a kind of aspirational socialism.

2:20We can go into that a bit further. But as this hit the newsstands, he then doubled down instead of sort of pulling away and saying, well, I think I might have overdone that or, you know, I think that was I wasn't expecting it to land quite in the way I thought. He's now gone to the Telegraph, not a sort of naturally Labour friendly place to talk, but he is clearly bidding to have their attention now to make waves in the Telegraph as a person within Labour circles who is unafraid to challenge Keir Starmer. and frankly to call out a lack of passion, a lack of direction, a lack of proper change that he feels the country needs.

3:08Burnham is a figure who has long attracted attention as a king over the water for the Labour Party. He's long been treated extremely suspiciously by Keir Starmer and by Number 10. Whenever Keir Starmer, there's a feeling that whenever Keir Starmer is in trouble, Burnham pops up. What he's doing here though, which is dangerous for Starmer, is that he is not only saying what we already knew. Guess what? Andy Burnham wants to be prime minister. We know that because he stood in 2015. It was his to win. He botched it and Jeremy Corbyn became leader instead. But he's actually spelling out, giving a serious critique to the Starmer government and spelling out an alternative prospectus.

3:46An alternative prospectus, which is clearly to the left of where Keir Starmer is. So he's saying and indeed criticising the way that Starmer has handled himself in office. So it is, as Emily says, pretty full frontal. You know, he's saying that number 10 has created a climate of fear in Labour. He's calling for council tax reform to increase rates on big homes in London and the southeast. He says there's a case for a 50p top income tax rate. He says that the government should not be, quote, in hock to the bond markets, afraid of the people who lend us money and therefore should be more imaginative.

4:20This is the sort of thing that Number 10, clearly on the eve of the Labour Party conference, will not welcome. He is doing something. He's going over and above what he has done before, where he's basically indicated that he might be interested in return to Westminster. He is setting out his stall comprehensively. Yeah. And the phrase that is used, which I think is a complete misnomer, is that he is on manoeuvres. You know, a country has military exercises. NATO has military exercises. This is more akin to February 2022 when Russian troops are massing on the border with Ukraine. He's massing his army ready to go over the top, to go into full operational leadership mode.

4:59He's saying actively, he says in the Telegraph, that Labour MPs are asking him to stand, which is very, very explicit. It just gives him a tiniest bit of distance when he says, oh, it's Labour MPs who are urging this on me. It's not my own personal ambition, of course. It's just that Labour MPs are so dissatisfied with what is happening down there in Westminster that makes him feel I've got to do this. And it'll be fascinating to see how this unfolds, because it seems slightly unbelievable that this is happening only a year and a bit into Keir Starmer's premiership, that a move to unseat him seems to be taking place right now.

5:37And it is the common chat around Labour circles. You know, not necessarily we've got to get behind Burnham, but the whole question of the leadership seems to be wide open. And that is a failure of leadership from Starmer. I think there would be no point in Burnham denying that he had ambitions for Westminster, for the premiership because we know he's been there twice before. In other words, he's trying to be straight talking about this. He's trying to come across as somebody who isn't, as you say, on manoeuvres, who is setting out his stall. And just to go back to that stall for a moment, I think it is quite interesting, this line about not being in hock to the bond markets.

6:20I mean, that whole James Carville phrase, you know, when I come back, I want to be reincarnated as the bond market, suggesting that the most powerful thing in institutional life is what the bond markets can do to any politician or their policies. I think Andy Burnham is trying to set himself up against Rachel Reeves, who, as we know from that moment in the Commons when she cried, she looked like she might be about to be sacked and then was saved by the bond markets. He's saying, I don't like Reevesism. I don't like the way that the Chancellor is going about the economy. He's already called for an end to the cap on two children having child benefits.

7:01In other words, he's, I think, describing a much more muscular kind of labour position. Yeah, you can call it left. You can call it brownite, maybe. You can just call it something that has a few more teeth to it. he's prepared to challenge Reeves. He's prepared to challenge things that might have seemed settled, like the cap on child benefits, because it is such an obvious place to correct huge amounts of child poverty in this country. He's prepared to take on council tax. And I think what he's trying to do is say, where are you on all this? I mean, where is Labour on this? And I think that's where he will chime with quite a lot of the party right now.

7:49Yes, they know Andy Burnham. Yes, they know what he's done for Manchester. Yes, they know that he's actually failed to get the job twice beforehand. But I think the timing is such that right now there are a lot of people in and around Keir Starmer who are like, I don't understand why we're here. I don't understand why you were so dependent on Morgan McSweeney. I don't understand why we had the catastrophe over the US ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson. and I don't understand how we got ourselves in the position of the sacking of Vangela Rayner. I don't understand where everything's gone wrong.

8:19And Burnham saying, well, maybe we just try and be a bit more the party that we should have been from the start. Well, most most specifically of all, what the Labour Party is yearning for and searching for on the eve of its conference is meaning and clarity. Yeah, it is yearning for definition and a sense of moral mission, which is something that the Labour Party, you know every single activist from the sort of Blairite right of the Labour Party to the Corbynite left of the Labour Party on some level yearns for him once and what Starmer we've talked about it many times has been unwilling or unable to do so far is provide that clarity and meaning and definition now he's clearly going to try and do that and answer that question both in the speech he's making tomorrow but also obviously in in the speech next week Andy Burnham is stepping into that void I think that Burnham is both very dangerous for an under 10 and actually not remotely dangerous at all for different reasons.

9:10He's dangerous because he can provide that clarity. Let's be clear, people are talking about him because he has been a very successful mayor in Greater Manchester. He clearly has a lot of political saliability and political strength. He won in his mayoral elections every single ward in Greater Manchester. That doesn't happen by accident. Even in the most Tory wards, he has clearly got a tremendous amount of political appeal. He also has a following within the Labour Party. His problem, of course, is simply that he's not a member of Parliament. The Labour Party is in a way in a similar-ish position.

9:38I don't think it's as bad, but you could argue. We talked about you and I, Emily, talked about this with Luke Trill last week. The Labour Party is in a sort of mindset, a bit like the Conservative Party was in 2019 with Theresa May. It's feeling exasperated with her. It wanted, the Conservative Party wanted another direction. There was a clear king over the water then. His name was Boris Johnson. He also had an alternative prospectus in the form of an alternative Brexit deal. Hey, presto, he comes in. What was the difference between him and Andy Burnham? Boris Johnson was a member of parliament.

10:03And the constitute, The political mechanism to get him into Parliament is a torturous and difficult one. So if I were in number 10, yes, I'd find this irritating. And they are briefing hard against him today. Hard, hard, hard. One Labour source telling everybody the same thing. I wonder how the people of Greater Manchester would feel about him ditching them, crashing the economy and sending their mortgages through the roof. So they are coming for him. But on another level, at the moment with Burnham, it's he and whose army? Because he's not a general on the field. Exactly. And just play it through the politics of this, particularly with reform, in the position it is in the polls right now, where it's riding high.

10:40You call a by-election. Some Labour MP who's a mate of Burnham says, right, I'll stand down, I'll stand out, you know, I'll get out of the way for you. He becomes the candidate, approved candidate for the Labour Party in said by-election. It is going to be a frigging circus because you're going to see massive tactical voting to stop Andy Burnham because it'll be so funny, so hilarious that the idea that Andy Burnham is trying to line up a safe seat just so that he can become prime minister. It's the sort of thing that voters would think, oh, bollocks to that. I'm not having anything to do with it.

11:13I'm not voting for Burnham because of it. And Labour are not riding high in the polls at the moment. There is absolutely no guarantee of any seat being safe for Andy Burnham to fight right now. So if Burnham does this, there is a massive gamble, a roll of the dice, because if he fought a by-election, and lost, he would look a right chump. I also think, to your point, Lewis, he is opening up a space between himself and Starmer. And if Starmer plays this well, he will say, is that really what you want? Look at what he's suggesting. He doesn't believe in the bond markets. He doesn't believe in fiscal rules.

11:53He doesn't believe in what we are doing to keep the economy, he would say, stable. I mean, the implication, we don't entirely know what Burnham means by, not being hopped to the bond markets, but the reading is that he'd be prepared to borrow a lot more money. Now, I think Keir Starmer can then turn that round and say, oh, really? Do you want the fiscal rules to go out the window then? We've got 96 % costs on borrowing. Is that really what you want? And so there is a world in which Burnham becomes quite a useful sort of stooge or control whereby Starmer says, tell me that's what you want. Is that really what you want?

12:31because I didn't think you liked it when Liz Truss didn't like the bon mark. Because I didn't think you liked it when she forgot all the fiscal rules. You know, is that, I mean, to your point, you know, the line about, you know, people crashing the economy, that's what they're suggesting. They're trying to line Andy Burnham up as a kind of Liz Truss wannabe and say he would be as careless as she was with your money. So there is a world in which Starmer has to play this right to say, if you don't do what we're doing, you end up where he's taking it. Well, I'm sure there will be an oblique reference in Starmer's speech next week.

13:04Obviously, we won't mention Burnham by name, but he'll say something along the lines of, you know, people who promise you false promises that can't be afforded are making exactly the same mistake that the Tories did. And everyone will know what it means. Everyone will know what it means that it'll be a rebuke to Burnham. But this is what I kind of mean about him being sort of both dangerous and not dangerous at the same time, which is that, look, I think it's a bit of a feeling developing that Burnham is overplaying his hand a bit. Oh no, where did you get that from? Well, no, but I mean, I don't mean in number 10.

13:33I mean, even among a median Labour MP. Look, median Labour MP right now, they are kind of terrified about reform. Yes, I don't think it's impossible at some point of this parliament, if the polling looks is where it is now, that clearly the Labour Party might be willing to consider more drastic options. There is still a feeling, though, that we're only a year in to a five-year parliament. The mechanism for getting Burnham into parliament is not clear. I mean, it's worse than just the by-election genre, and what a kind of, as you say, what a circus it would be. Like, actually, in order for him to stand, right, the NEC, the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, would have to allow him to be a candidate in this selection, right?

14:10Now, that means that the Starmer-controlled NEC, as it currently is, would have to allow Burnham, who has already made it clear that he wants Starmer's job, to stand in that by-election, to come into parliament. I mean, Starmer would have to basically turn around, do you fancy my job, Andy? Yeah, come on into parliament. Deputy Leader becomes so critical. Yeah, but that's still just one. I mean, yeah, so Lucy Powell, who's obviously running for Deputy Leader, is kind of Burnham's person. If she becomes Deputy Leader, she gets an automatic place on the NEC. That helps Burnham, but still just, you know, one seat on the NEC.

14:39So that's difficult. And also they'll be able to say, number 10 will be able to say, hang on, Andy Burnham, your term as Greater Manchester Mayor doesn't expire until 2028. So are you going to continue as Mayor of Greater Manchester and be an MP at the same time? And if you're not... I think Dan Jarvis did that. Yes, he did. But this is a bigger thing. Right. And Dan Jarvis stopped doing it in the end because he said it was too much work. But I mean, there is a precedent for Boris Johnson. Yes, for a brief period. Yeah. Right. So but also the point is, if he doesn't, then there has to be another by-election.

15:09And this time for the greater Manchester mayoralty. I was talking to a Labour person last night who said, you know, we'd probably lose that right now. So the NEC can sort of turn around and say we can't afford Mandy. And we'd love to have you in Parliament, but we can't afford to possibly risk a greater Manchester mayoralty by-election. So honestly, I actually read this with Burnham to some extent. I think it's a kind of creed occur. I think it's almost like a sign of desperation. He's desperate to get back into the Westminster game, however much he kind of pretends that he abhorses. He's desperate to do it.

15:36He's been desperate for some time. And actually, he can't see a path to it. And that's why he's doing easy to use it. Or he just wants a bigger role. He wants something from this that doesn't end in the premiership, but ends in him being brought into the Keir circle. But Starman now hates him. I don't know. And also the kind of, I mean, you know, you were talking about the briefing operation. Get sent to Washington. Andy, how do you fancy a long trip? A long trip. A change of scene. Exactly. The other thing that kind of keeps being thrown at Burnham. And I knew him when he was a special advisor back in the 90s.

16:10He's a general special advisor. Yeah, exactly. Who then becomes an MP, who is then an Uber Blairite, who then when Blair falls becomes a brownite. the critique that you hear from a lot of those sort of people back then is that he just blew with wherever the wind was blowing who does that remind us of well i yeah i know that i'm not sure keir starmer's the guy to make that argument no but it is the argument that is made about is that a fair argument or not i mean i i don't know i i think a bit more charitably to burnham you could say that like you know he's as you say he's been in politics a long time yeah like you know for 25 years whatever politics is really different you know it's changed so much in that time politics on the left has changed in that time i don't think it's completely unreasonable that he may have moved a little bit over over the years particularly from being a young man and like i say i mean there are politicians who can make the argument about you know politicians being chameleons i'm not sure keir starmer is the strongest candidate to make that i mean about someone else tom mctaghan in the new statesman describes the bad blood that already existed between starmer and burnham because burnham refused to support starmer's bid for the leadership and went for one of the Manchester candidates, Lisa Nandy or Rebecca Long-Bailey.

17:16I forget who he went for in the end. Nandy, I think. Right. So, I mean, so there was always, I think, that sense of a personal animus between the two of them. Oh, yeah, they can't stand each other. They can't stand each other. And I guess, I mean, I guess the other thing about Andy Burnham is do you think, and this plays to a bigger question, which is, has somebody who's been for the job twice and failed got closer to realising who they are and what their politics are and are they now happier in their skin being who they are? Or did the electorate just look at you and kind of go, OK, that ambition's been sitting there for a while and, you know, I don't really...

17:50I mean, the thing that always comes to mind for me is David Miliband, who kept on sort of jabbing and then running at Gordon Brown. He wrote that big op-ed piece for The Guardian. The Guardian and the Sunday Times profile. Exactly. And it was very interesting that he sort of went towards it and then didn't quite dare, went towards it, didn't quite dare. James Purnell resigned from the cabinet to free up the space for David Miliband to launch the kind of leadership bid and he chickened out. I mean, the other thing is, is that like whatever Burnham says about the bond markets and you could make an argument that you could risk it a bit and sort of go for a more aggressive borrowing strategy if you did it in the right way and it wouldn't necessarily be a repeat of trust because trust did things in a certain way.

18:32But, you know, you can make that argument. But it's also true to say that, like, a Burnham government would face so many of the same structural tension. You could replace Starmer with Burnham. I think Burnham, one thing Burnham would clearly, I think, be better at is the communications element of the job. You could argue he'd be better at providing that definition. He's got successes under his belt, I think, in a way that Starmer hasn't really. I mean, hugely respected over the Hillsborough compensation scheme and what he's actually brought to victims of Hillsborough. I remember him as health secretary talking about the need to find a solution to social care.

19:03I mean, I can't believe I'm saying this, but it was 20 years ago, you know. So this idea that he was actually much more prepared, always prepared to work cross-party to find those things. And he's made a success of Manchester. So I think he's genuinely... It's a lot easier being great at Manchester. Of course it is, I know. It's like going from local to national is a different thing. And I'm not saying for a moment that Manchester is some backwater. He's done extraordinary things with that and he's transformed it. It's brilliant. but it doesn't always translate to the kind of crumbling edifices and complications of Westminster, right?

19:35I think it's just a bit early. Well, yeah, OK. That's the thing, isn't it? OK, is this going to happen or not? I don't think, no. I just don't see any mechanism for him to get into Parliament. If you're in Parliament, we'd be having a totally different conversation. Emily Maitlis, I'm coming to you now. I don't think you can change leader more than once for Labour in five years and I'd be very surprised if it happened this quickly in this way. I think the ambition is there. I just don't see the mechanisms by which it happens. I think structurally it's too difficult. So we could all be wrong by next time.

20:08Anyway, so on that basis, he'll be Prime Minister by Christmas. Exactly. There we are. We'll be back in just a moment with Patrick Marber, the director of the producers, but a stunning back catalogue of the day-to-day and all sorts of other, Alan Partridge, etc., etc. and his new theatrical production has just opened in London to absolute rave reviews.

20:33If you want to catch up on more on the Andy Burnham story you can find it on our free Global Player app on LBC.

20:51the news agents across the road from this studio barely 50 paces away a production of the producers has just opened the kind of famous mel brooks film from this 1960s that has come back to life in a new production directed by Patrick Marber. Who Patrick Marber? You know who Patrick Marber is. He's directed and written bloody everything that you ever thought was funny, and he's in the studio now. And it's a great, great pleasure to have you here with us. Thank you for coming in. Thank you so much. There's so much back catalogue we could talk about. I want to start, though, with the producers. And there were so many swastikas on that stage in one show.

21:36It was incredible. and you couldn't help thinking of all those. That's quite an interesting... I think you have to explain a bit more what it's about before saying there was so many swastikas. Well, it's a parody on Hitler and the idea of the producers, if you haven't seen it, is that there are theatrical producer, Max Bialystok, who wants to make a production because he's raised so much money for it that it fails on the first night and he pockets the money that's left over. Except it is so camp and so kitsch, it becomes a glorious stunning success camp kitsch it's got everything and lots of swastikas there we are have i explained the swastikas satisfactorily i i think so um yes the unscrupulous producer max bialerstock and his co-producer leo bloom who's an accountant they've come up with this scheme that a producer can make more money with a flop than a hit so really the first half of the show is it's like the magnificent seven they recruit the worst possible people to put on a show and then in the second half it's what happens and you see you see a bit of the show and but yes they they are producing a show called springtime for hitler and they've read a lot of plays and they've they've decided this is the worst one and it can't possibly succeed i suppose I mentioned so many swastikas because we do seem to be in a season right now in England I say England advisedly where there are an awful lot of flags around I mean not swastikas obviously but the kind of portrayal macho portrayal often of the St George's flag and I just wondered kind of whether you know this is a parody on Hitler and a satire on Hitler and I just wonder whether it It was also applicable in a wider sense.

23:26Well, let's say it's a satire, but very low-level satire. It's not a sharp satire, I would say. It's much more farcical than that. The tone of the show is, as you would expect from Mel Brooks, it's preposterous and it's silly and it's playful and it's rude. and it's more comparable with something like Book of Mormon as a piece of work than Jonathan Swift. It's mocking lots of different things. Yes, the Nazis get mocked. To my knowledge, when Mel Brooks wrote the film and made it and released it in 1967, it was possibly the first piece of comedy done about Nazism. I think up till then maybe there'd been some funny cartoons but no one had, I think if you were growing up in the 40s and 50s you would be watching very serious programmes and very serious commentary on what had happened but I think Mel Brooks was the first person to go yes and we can laugh at it as well I mean it's extraordinary when that first came out it was 20 years after the end of the Second World War and the sort of force of emotion must have been extraordinary to be punctuated by something that just said, we are allowed to laugh at this.

24:47Yes, I think it would have been very shocking. Very shocking, right? To see the sequence where they perform Springtime for Hitler in 1967. And it wasn't well-reviewed, the original film. The person who apocryphally, is that a word? Saved the project was Peter Sellers, who took out an ad in Variety and said, everyone must go and see Mel Brooks' film. And that kind of put it on the map that someone so famous, and a Jewish comic as well, supporting another Jewish comic. It became a cult film after that. Because what you do is, at the centre of the musical, is a very fat, camp, ridiculous, funny Hitler.

25:33Yes. And you give people permission to laugh instead of feeling... Yes. Rage. What happens in the show is that the person who's cast to play Hitler, who is in fact German, breaks his leg on opening night. And the director of the show, who's very, very camp, a character called Roger Debris, who's brilliantly played by Trevor Ashley. The second he came in an audition, I thought, that's our Roger. Because he brought something to it. The idea of having a rotund Hitler was not something that I was necessarily looking for. But when he came in and sang Springtime, I just thought this is this is fantastic.

26:14Hitler has been portrayed in many different ways, but not fat and gay. And Patrick, I want to kind of take that idea because the parallels for now are very clear and very obvious, aren't they? that we've got a kind of dictator-like figure in America who is both farcical and deeply scary. And that seems to me the conundrum that we've got in Trump, that on the one hand, we're all laughing at him when he speaks at the UN and he moans about the escalators and the teleprompter and the mics and, you know, and the fact that he has to actually walk up a flight of stairs. It's hilarious. And then in the same breath, he goes after his political enemies and he rounds up people and he deports them.