Is Tony Blair getting in Andy Burnham’s way?

20:25Andy Burnham:other thing that just takes you into the sort of Blair Burnham mindset, which I found quite interesting. And this was over the decision that we had a couple of weeks ago from Ed Meliband, from the Foreign Secretary, when he said we're going to sanction any goods that come out of Israel's settler territories, or territories. I was told that this idea was mooted to him, I think via James Purnell. And Blair didn't really agree with it, but understood it. You know, it was something I was told that the UK ambassador to Israel didn't really agree with. Tony Blair didn't really agree with. But Andy Burnham decided to back Miliband, as we know, and just said, we've got this.

21:12Andy Burnham:We're going to do it. And the thing that sort of slightly changed Blair's mind on the whole thing was when he saw that not a peep came out of the Trump administration. And I think that was a real moment for Burnham to get this passed, not just with his allies in Europe and with Mark Carney in Canada, but to actually say, we've got this. And there was no pushback from Trump. This quiet acquiescence to the Burnham plan on sanctions, which I think has given him a sense of like, yeah, you know, we've got this relationship. We've sorted out. Maybe on the Chagos, that's why they are listening to Trump.

21:49Andy Burnham:They're saying we can't just sell off something when our partner in Diego Garcia doesn't want to play along. So that one, I'm told, is now dead. But on the settler issue, the fact that Trump just backed off completely, I think, has been a big sort of win for Bill.

22:05Jon Sopel:No, let's go back to where we started. It may be that the Blair-Burnham relationship will be fraught and will be difficult and there'll be fireworks. But I think that people who are predicting it at the moment haven't yet got the evidence that that is there. And we'll see how it develops. But, you know, Blair simultaneously will want Burnham to succeed, but not shine so brightly that people would think, God, he's so much better than that Tony Blair bloke.

22:31Andy Burnham:We'll be back in a moment with a bit more of a profile of the man who is now our prime minister.

23:19We'll be right back.

23:22Andy Burnham:Well, joining us now is Tom McTague, who is the editor of the New Statesman, who has just interviewed Andy Burnham for the second time. You might remember, we talk about Tom quite a lot on this podcast because it was Tom that interviewed Andy Burnham last year. And I suppose we could say, unfairly or not, possibly ended his chances of running a year ago because it was then that he told you, I think, Tom, that he didn't want to be in hock to the bond markets. And it's a line that has sort of followed him round, he would say, slightly unfairly.

23:53Tom McTague:Yeah. Yeah, it was an interesting moment there, because I don't think I expected that line to be sort of quite as explosive as it was. You know, it was Andy Burnham really trying to make his case then and the case that he makes now that Britain is this particularly fragile country. And we've just got ourselves into this position where, you know, events happen and we seem to get battered by them more violently than other countries. And I think that sense that we all feel, you know, since 2007, really, that we have become a vulnerable country. And that's what he was trying to explain, that we shouldn't be in a position where we are so fearful of the bond markets.

24:34Tom McTague:And the obvious answer to that is, well, don't borrow so much from them. You know, that's the obvious answer. But I think what was fascinating about the reaction is that obviously a lot of it was driven from the Treasury and Number 10, people who were briefing against him, who were furious with him for his obvious attempt to replace Keir Starmer. And this was the sort of the weapon that they were using to say, look, this guy's not serious.

25:00Andy Burnham:It's the scariest thing you could throw at him.

25:02Tom McTague:Yeah.

25:02Andy Burnham:And we want to come on to your newest interview with him. But Tom, we've just been talking about this sort of, would you call it an intervention? I think you probably would call it an intervention by Tony Blair, by Tony Blair Institute on the eve of Burnham's first conference, which is get rid of your red lines over Europe. Come on, let's let's go. And you have this very interesting line that Blair, you think, is despairing of Burnham. we know that he didn't have a great relationship with Starmer what do you think this relationship with Burnham is like if it exists at all so my understanding is that they they haven't spoken

25:41Tom McTague:since um Andy Burnham became prime minister I mean I think there is a there is a bit of sort of back and forth going on at the moment about you know the the the extent of the communication between the two of them. But that's my understanding. But I think what I have been told is that Tony Blair feels that there is a sort of lack of seriousness, not just from Andy Burnham, but a sort of general kind of British disease here that none of us are taking seriously. The extent of the revolution that's underway and the challenges that this country faces and that we're kind of Westminster, when I say we, this kind of Westminster stuck in this bubble, you know, talking about, you know, nothing, you know, just sort of frippery, you know, that doesn't matter and that we're sort of just head in the sand and we're becoming small and irrelevant and sort of boring.

26:41Tom McTague:And I think that is the feeling that he has, Tony Blair, about the country and the state of its politics for the last, I mean, I think since he left, for 20 years.

26:55Jon Sopel:But Tom, I suppose it's possible that Andy, I mean, you know, they will disagree over the definition of 40 years of failure and neoliberalism, I suspect. But wouldn't Andy Burnham also say that politics is failing Britain? And that's his mission. That's what he wants to change. So it's possible there could be some kind of alignment there in thinking about, you know, we haven't been dealing with the problems that are the most pressing in this country.

27:24Tom McTague:Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, if you think back to when Tony Blair was at his pomp, there is a core populist appeal that Tony Blair had from the beginning. It was central to New Labour to appeal to the country, to appeal to Middle England. You know, one of the central challenges that Tony Blair made to his party was you cannot change the voters. These are the voters. This is what they believe. We have to move towards them to be elected, to change things. And I think the criticism of Tony Blair today is that he doesn't give enough grace to leaders today who have to make those decisions, who have to deal with the country as it is, and it's the concerns that the country has, because he operates in this stratosphere now, which is completely different to most politicians.

28:17Andy Burnham:Do you believe there's any truth? And, you know, I think we've heard from various contacts, some of whom who've conceded this and some of whom rubbished it, that Blair could at one stage have imagined coming back. I mean, would actually like to come back as Labour leader.

28:33Tom McTague:I've no doubt that Tony Blair thinks he would be a better prime minister than all of the prime ministers that have come after him. So there must be a sense in which he thinks, well, of course, I could come back. You know, I'm young, I'm fit. I'm, you know, when I intervene.

28:48Andy Burnham:The biceps are out on display today, we saw.

28:51Tom McTague:I'm sure he did. I think there was a moment from the reporting I've done in the period when Jeremy Corbyn was leader, where my understanding is that Tony Blair all but gave up on the Labour Party. And that was, you know, the creation of the Tony Blair Institute, a sense at the time that it could be a vehicle of a kind of homage, Macron-style centrist party, and that there were a lot of people close to Tony Blair at the time who had concluded that the Labour Party was finished. And it was a vehicle from the 20th century. it was a kind of it was a post-industrial revolution party and that tony blair thinks that we're living in a post-digital revolution world and the economy has completely changed and yet we have these political vehicles that are just from a bygone era you know they're out of date

29:47Jon Sopel:and what we need is something new so tom you sat down with burnham i i just it is so striking that a year ago he was sent away from liverpool with a flea in his ear and everyone was laughing thing and saying, oh, you silly fool. Look at you. You're the prince across the water, but you haven't got a boat that gets you across the water. And here everyone's looking forward to a Labour Party conference where they're all feeling buoyed by the fact that he's now the prime minister. I mean, is he feeling self-confident? Is he feeling energised by it all? Or is he kind of slightly terrified by, you know, he looks slightly terrified, frankly, when he sat down with Donald Trump this week?

30:23Tom McTague:I suppose we all would, wouldn't we? um i i mean two things on that i don't think that the the story that last year's uh party conference was a disaster and he was finished is correct actually i think obviously that was the consensus view at the time in westminster that was a consensus view at the party conference oh he's blown it you know he's gone too early um he's you know he's he's had to leave the party conference with the tail between his legs i mean i think the counter argument is that there were just structural forces in play that were clearly leading towards a fundamental crisis for Keir Starmer that he couldn't avoid.

30:59Tom McTague:His unpopularity, combined with the complete disloyalty of his party and cabinet, the lack of faith that they had in him, combined with the inevitable disaster at the May elections, was going to lead to an opening. And the question was, who could go through that opening? And you had to, if you were Andy Burnham, you were outside of Westminster. You had to force yourself into that conversation. You had to show Labour Party members why it was you, because he didn't have a route to power at that time. So, you know, it should have really been West Streeting or Angela Rayne or any of these figures who had the route to power.

31:34Tom McTague:It wasn't. That is still a remarkable thing that happened. Annie Burnham somehow created an opportunity for himself from Manchester, convinced the entire Labour Party to only give it to him. And he just had this kind of silent coup.

31:46Andy Burnham:That was a coup for polling, wasn't it? I mean, because the polls kept on showing us that everyone in the cabinet was as unpopular as Keir Starmer, except for Burnham. I mean, it's almost like the party just took that on trust.

31:59Tom McTague:Well, exactly. But it also, I think, you know, you need to force that opening a little bit like Boris Johnson, right? You need to sort of constantly remind people. And that is a question of skillful political positioning. Andy Burnham positioned himself as an outsider who was going to unpick 40 years of neoliberalism. That is a pitch to the voters and to members.

32:18Jon Sopel:But Tom, I suppose my question is, is the Andy Burnham you met a year ago, the outsider frustrated, sensing there may be an opportunity, a very different one to the one you've most recently met where he's the prime minister he's got flunkies galore he's got security he's

32:34Tom McTague:got all the rest of it uh so yes and no so i think i have been surprised at the sort of buoyancy and the sense of energy with andy burnham since he came in like he does seem like somebody who's kind of got the bit between his teeth you know he's got that sense of confidence i think that i wasn't expecting and i think is different from the andy burnham that not just a year ago but a few years ago, slightly kind of bashful, you know, he'd lost twice, you know, to get the leadership. You know, had he concluded that essentially he was never going to be prime minister, he always wanted to be prime minister, thought he could do it.

33:13Tom McTague:Had he concluded, I'm going to be a Neely man, I'm going to have to make do with being the mayor of Manchester. And he, you know, he'd kind of come to terms with that. It was a good life. This is like this opportunity that has happened so quickly. He's engineered it, but he's got it. And he got it unopposed. And now suddenly he's the prime minister sitting on this extraordinary majority.

33:33Andy Burnham:But the trouble with the Andy Burnham we've got at the moment is he's the man who came and said, I've got a plan. This is all broken. We need something big. And we're kind of waiting to see if he's really, I mean, as you explain the interview, is he actually going to, is he brave enough to be the person that he knows he has to be? So when Blair mentions getting rid of the red lines or when we talk about a budget that actually has to deliver something, I thought it was really remarkable, Tom, that when Andy Haldane said, oh, you know, he's basically tax and spend chancellor with better TikTok. The response that Burnham gave was, oh, no, I cancelled the digital ID cards.

34:11Andy Burnham:I mean, ridiculously small, right? To the Blair point. Where is that big thought?

34:18Tom McTague:Yeah, I think it's a reasonable challenge. So the way Andy Burnham described it to me in the interview is that what you're building towards is a few big moments where we are going to be left in no doubt what his plan is. That is his argument. And we'll see how true it is as it plays out. So he is saying that a lot of the previous prime ministers that we've come across, you didn't quite know why they wanted to be prime minister. They were kind of they wanted to be because they wanted to be prime minister. They wanted the sort of the gravitas, the kudos, this sort of, you know, their name in the historical records.

34:55Andy Burnham:I think I'd be good at it was the Cameron line, wasn't it?

34:59Jon Sopel:The greatest thing I heard someone say about Boris Johnson was he never wanted to be prime minister. He just wanted to have been prime minister. Yes.

35:06Tom McTague:Whereas the argument, and Andy Burnham is made, I am sort of seized, was his word. I am seized by the power that I've got and the opportunity I've got. And it combines with this moment, this sad moment where his father has died and he's been trying to, having to deal with this sort of family crisis at the same time. And I think there is something interesting at play here where his father was a kind of old labor man with these strong kind of convictions. And his mom was the new labor moderate who gave him his Catholic faith. And so the two sides of Andy Burnham there are playing out in his father and his mother.

35:45Tom McTague:And his dad, though, had these convictions and they were resolute and they were on things like proportional representation. other things that he is sort of bang on to his son and say you know can't you see that this is the obvious thing to do this is the right thing to do now that's playing out in his mind social care devolution and um i think we might we might see pr in in time and i think he's not i mean europe is not up there well i did ask him about europe i you know i said you know because his his big thing is is funnily enough taking back control so he says if you can distill and giving

36:22Andy Burnham:it away again yes i mean if fiscal devolution is the big idea for you know what we're being told and sort of the budget and the next six months then it's like taking the the power to sort of

36:33Tom McTague:hand it out right yeah his argument is that you um too much of this country feels like it doesn't have the control to actually make its life better yeah you know so you have to give power to areas to be able to make their lives better, to be able to make their town centres and their high streets and all the rest better, to make interventions in preventative care. That's the argument. So he says it's about control, which is a kind of almost French kind of way of thinking about it. There are arguments that say you need to have control in the centre to be able to do that as well. And he is saying, I'm going to show you these reforms in this Labour Party conference speech and then in the 10-year plan that is going to come and then with the budget, probably the bigger budget that's coming next year.

37:25Tom McTague:And his argument is, you will know exactly what I stand for when it comes to Tuesday's speech and you will be able to say, I either agree with you or I disagree with you, but I know what you stand for. That is, I think, a big test because going up against or contrabanding Trusting him with Keir Starmer. Clearly, the problem with Keir Starmer is we didn't really know what he thought.

37:48Andy Burnham:But I also think, you know, everyone has a 10-year plan, except the electorate, who actually don't give you time for a 10-year plan. You know, who's going to be alive in 10 years, according to AI?

37:58Tom McTague:And I guess coming back to your point about Europe is that part of the plan. And I remember pushing him on this and saying, well, can you take control? Can you exert control either inside or outside Europe? Like, can you do it from outside Europe? Can your plans make sense outside of Europe? Obviously, Eurosceptics was counter here. Can you take control of immigration and other things inside Europe? But his argument, he just skirted it. He just said, we are where we are. Now, I read into that at least that it's still an open question for him. I think it is a test of how radical he's going to be.

38:39Tom McTague:You also have to think about Makerfield, his constituency, which is you're a skeptic. And he says he learned a lot from the constituency going around knocking on doors. And he basically says, you know, my voters are right. Their instincts are right. So there is a kind of conflict, I think, there. But we know what his own instincts are. His own instincts very much are that Britain should be in the European Union. It was a mistake to leave. His wife is Dutch. his family therefore you know his mother and father-in-law Dutch he feels it he feels that Britain took a wrong turn

39:14Andy Burnham:Tom great to have you in thanks for coming thank you very much

39:17Tom McTague:thank you

39:36accents for every room in the house. Wayfair has what you need to make Halloween feel like magic all in one place. Because the best Halloween memories aren't made in just one night. They're made all season long. Shop Halloween decor now at wayfair.com. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com. Wayfair, every style, every home.

40:03you put your badge on a pin pad you tap it you put in your pin which i did like i do every time and it started flashing red i tried it again it continued to flash red i asked the u.s secret service that was sitting there what was happening with my badge he took the badge he ran it again And he said, quote, it's still being disabled. It's still coming up as disabled. So that was all that I was able to get from the Secret Service. There was no other White House official nearby that I could speak to.

40:39Jon Sopel:So the ban is still in place. So let's go through the two possible explanations for this. One is the White House are unaware that the federal judge ruled last night and just haven't caught up with the news. or they are just flouting the ruling of a court to say, don't give a damn.

41:01Andy Burnham:Or it's just a cock up and they haven't actually worked out how to reinstate a pin. I do think it's interesting because the news organisations went into this lawsuit knowing, frankly, that they were going to win. Because the one thing that every sort of first grader learns is about the importance of the First Amendment. Your First Amendment rights are the rights to free speech. that you do not have to be held accountable, you know, as a journalist, as a news organisation, for what you say, you just have to be allowed to say it. You are allowed to speak truth to power, you are allowed to criticise the administration, that is all fine and allowed by the First Amendment.

41:42Andy Burnham:What was interesting was that Trump originally sort of revealed why he'd banned them, which was than they're mean to me. And then he tried to find this kind of alternate reason, which was national security, as if it was a national security breach to be talking about the Iran war, a national security breach to be talking about the price of oil, a national security breach to be talking about, for example, weapons and how much they'd spent and how many were left and all the rest of it. And this judge has rejected that argument. He's revoked that revoking the press credentials so those outlets was necessary to protect national security.

42:19Andy Burnham:He's just thrown it out.

42:20Jon Sopel:This whole national security argument is such a crock of shit. I have never heard anything like it. Look, the reporters in question working for MSNOW and CNN, the idea that they are a threat to national security. How? Why? They are just compiling reports on what Donald Trump has said that day. Sometimes they're critical. Sometimes they're fair. Sometimes they're supportive. But often they are critical. That's enough. OK, that's where they come from. That is because you have a free press in America that can be pro or it can be anti. There isn't an Ofcom telling them what they can and can't do. But the idea that these journalists are a threat to national security is laughable.

43:06Jon Sopel:It is risible and it is absolutely ridiculous.

43:10Andy Burnham:Yeah. So I guess the only question that we've got remaining is up till now, other broadcasters have joined these three in their boycott in a show of solidarity. If the ban has now been thrown out, but they still can't get in, where does that leave everyone else?

43:27Jon Sopel:Then I think that the boycott continues. And President Xi arrived last night at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. Trump went to meet him. Trump went to meet him, which is incredibly unusual. and there were no cameras there to record it because the pool are still boycotting and I think will continue to boycott until MS Now, Politico and CNN are allowed back in and allowed to go through the security hut and into the White House grounds.

43:55Andy Burnham:There is nothing like a red carpet state welcome on the radio.

44:02Jon Sopel:With very bad audio.

44:05Andy Burnham:We'll be back tomorrow.

44:06Jon Sopel:We'll see you then. Bye-bye. Halloween only lasts one day. With Wayfair, one night of Halloween becomes a whole season at home. From larger-than-life yard decor and moody lighting to festive accents for every room in the house, Wayfair has what you need to make Halloween feel like magic all in one place. Because the best Halloween memories aren't made in just one night. They're made all season long. Shop Halloween decor now at Wayfair.com. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com. Wayfair, every style, every home. This has been a global production.

45:09I R.com. Way fair, every style, every home.