Paranoia in the Labour Party: the Andy Burnham enigma

0:00How is Andy Burnham spending his days? He is trying to meet every Labour MP just about and every minister. He's having one-on-ones in Portculler's house just over there in his office, in a WIT's office that's been given to him for this period of time. And when he's sitting there, some of them are just very direct about the jobs they want and why they'd be really good in those jobs. And it's kind of like a what have you got for me thing. And he's quite taken aback by that. Welcome to The State of It, the political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times. I'm Stephen Swinford, the political editor of The Times.

0:29And I'm Patrick McGuire, chief political commentator for The Times. This week we want to talk to you about two things. The first thing we'd like to talk to you about is the kind of weird state of paranoia in the Cabinet because essentially no one knows what's going on. Everything is happening in a black box in Andy Burnham's head and that is creating some pretty paranoid and febrile behaviour out there in Cabinet among the broader parliamentary party. Well, yeah, indeed it is, Steve. And I'd say that paranoia is never far from the surface. I mean, I've lost count of the number of conversations I've had this week that start off a bit like Morgan McSweeney, who's been out about breaking his silence and talking in his own voice to the media for the first time today, at least on the record.

1:14Patrick Maguire: He has said, you know, he feels optimistic about Andy Burnham. If you speak to any minister, any MP, any special advisor, they'll tell you the same. I feel optimistic. I want Andy Burnham to survive. but it doesn't take long. You scratch the surface of those conversations for reservations to come thick and fast. And as you say, I think paranoia is one word of putting it. Nervousness is another. And there's not a little resentment because people feel that they might end up hanging from lampposts as collaborators with the hated former totalitarian Starmer regime. And something that's struck me throughout all of the conversations I've been having, really, is two things.

1:55The first is that Andy Burnham's talk of the North

1:59Patrick Maguire: and Manchester and all of that stuff, and I've written about this in my column tomorrow, this general atmosphere of fear and loathing and nervousness, that is making MPs in the South East and London a little bit nervous. They're thinking, does Andy Burnham have broader peers? And there's a lot of them. Yes, there are loads. There are 90-plus MPs in London and the South East alone. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So that is one reservation. I mean, on the other hand, I reveal in my column, the University and Colleges Union, a good window into progressive urban voters. You know, says 44 % of the many members among them who want to vote Green are much more likely to vote for Andy Burnham under Labour.

2:40Patrick Maguire: So maybe that's a message they can stop moaning once they realise Andy Burnham is squeezing a progressive vote. But the other thing is this question of ministerial appointments. Now, literally, as we were setting up this podcast, I got a message from someone. And this is happening a lot. It'll be happening to you in your conversations as well. Every conversation we are having with ministers now turns into basically a pitch as to why we should think Andy Burnham would be mad to sack them or move them. And I got this from a cabinet source just now, talking about how Andy Burnham needs institutional memory and telling me.

3:16Patrick Maguire: You can tell this is good comms. They pitched it directly from me. There are some interesting historical parallels. Thank you very much. I like those. James Callaghan kept Healy as Chancellor and Edmund Dell as Trade Minister from Wilson's Cabinet at a time when the economy and balance of payments were politically salient. And John Major kept Douglas Hurd as Foreign Secretary from Thatcher's Cabinet at a time when Europe had become increasingly important to the Tory party. You know, that goes to show, that's the sort of language we're hearing from people, the sort of argument we're hearing from people.

3:45Patrick Maguire: The other thing we should note is what may become Andy Burnham's woman problem. We spoke about this on the podcast earlier this week when Lara gave us that quote about more Milibands in a great office estate than women. And this, you know, women in the PLP have long memories. And for this, for some of them, you know, lots of long serving female Labour MPs and Labour peers, etc. This is bringing back memories of Gordon Brown's cabinets. 2007, he appoints the youngest cabinet in history. There were seven of them who were under the age of 42. That's why so many of them are still in contention to come in Andy Burnham's cabinet.

4:22Patrick Maguire: And there's a sense of it's a reunion of that class of 2007, right? You've got Andy Burnham, James Pennell running his number 10, Ed Miliband, maybe David Miliband's coming back. But if that is the sort of, if that's the look, you'll have lots of people who remember, well, hang on, what else happened in Gordon Brown's cabinet? You know, Yvette Cooper didn't get full cabinet rank until 2008, despite being one of his people. Harriet Harman wasn't made deputy prime minister. Ruth Kelly was demoted. Margaret Beckett was unceremoniously demoted from the Foreign Office as one of Gordon Brown's first acts.

4:57Patrick Maguire: Hazel Blairs and Jackie Smith felt that they were made to carry the can and made scapegoats for the expenses scandal. And that all culminates in Caroline Flint in 2009 talking about a two-tier cabinet where women are mere window dressing. and as much as Andy Burnham is talking about a culture change we should say obviously all the leading lines of his backroom team are women and Andy Burnham has spoken about his fear of crossing those very formidable women but you know there are a lot of women in the PLP who will be paying very close attention even if it's the most female cabinet in history to where those women are and which women have lost out so so those are the things people are worrying about and given you I write in my column about something I call Burnham magnanimity syndrome.

5:42Patrick Maguire: Everybody's caught it, even Morgan McSweeney. Everyone wants to be nice and magnanimous to Andy Burnham in public. But it's not going to take long for people to be cured of that if they're looking at some decisions he's made. They're full of doubts and nervousness already and there are going to be a lot of losers under this government. And it's not going to take much for them to kick off. This is a PLP that is quite happy to rant and rave and moan. That is obviously true and part of it is because at this point Andy Burnham is at his most powerful. He has made no cabinet appointments so all of the cards are his and no one knows what the cards are and I'll give you an idea of what that feels like.

6:22I got a briefing from some people around Ed Miliband. Now lots of people are writing that Ed Miliband will be Chancellor, that he is the frontrunner. All the signs do point in that direction but the fact is that Ed doesn't know. He really genuinely doesn't know. And some people around him started raising concerns. Do you think Lou Haig is going to be chancellered? Is there anything to read in that? And I said, well, all of the signals that I'm getting is, what we've been getting is that she's being talked about for chancellors of the Duchy of Lancaster. So a different type of chancelless. Yeah, she will be a chancelless.

6:54But that just speaks to the kind of paranoia out there that even Ed Miliband does not appear to know his destiny at this point in time. And we are in the midst of summer party season here in Westminster. And it's notable how few Labour cabinet ministers are at some of these events, I think because they're obviously trying to just focus on trying to get their jobs and keep their jobs, right? It's weird. Normally they're flooded at these events and we're not seeing that many of them. Yeah, and even what they are announcing, right, what they are spending their last two weeks in custody of their departmental press offices to release, You can tell there's a through line through every minister's announcement now.

7:34Patrick Maguire: You can tell their communications and people are thinking, how do we make this sound really Burnham friendly? How do we make this sound like it's a bit of his agenda he can just pick up and run with? We presented to him on a silver platter. And by the way, we should say he could do worse in some places. The devolution agenda the government's doing is already quite radical. The stuff DEFRA are doing about the water bill. Regardless of who's the ministers in these departments, the water bill doesn't need to be tweaked that much to resemble public control, as Burnham talks about it. But yeah, there is a definite attempt for people to make very public claims, however subtly they think they're doing it, to keeping their jobs.

8:11Patrick Maguire: And some of them would have quite a good claim to, actually. But as we've been saying, to a governess to choose, and Andy Burnham has a lot of very crunchy choices to make that will end up in some people experiencing humiliation and crushing disappointment. So yeah, no pressure. But we've spoken about Ed Miliband. I think the David Miliband question is massive. Which we did earlier this week, right? He's linked to foreign secretary. Yeah, exactly. Linked to foreign secretary. But there are two questions that flow from that. Okay, you don't make him foreign secretary. Where do you put it? Is it something domestic?

8:46Patrick Maguire: Would he take it? Yeah, exactly. Would he take a mid-ranking domestic cabinet job? I mean, there is a question of what would be the point? I mean, this guy has been running the International Rescue Committee for a decade, would he want to do it? And also, how would your upwardly mobile, ambitious minister of state or cabinet minister who'd been moved somewhere else and fancied a domestic brief or maybe had been sat from cabinet altogether, how would they feel saying, well, hang on, there are loads of Labour MPs. There are more than 400 of us and there are about 100 ministers and you've picked that guy to roll, I don't know, the Department for Transport or whatever.

9:17Patrick Maguire: I'm sure that's all beneath Lord Miliband, as we'll soon be calling him, but there we go. And the other question is, okay, if he's not foreign secretary, but you put in something foreign facing. I know we both had conversations, Steve, with cabinet sources this week who've been looking at David Miliband's name, looking at, okay, maybe you won't get foreign secretary. There is a development minister in the cabinet. Does Andy Burnham give David Miliband that job? But at the same time, that budget has been cut repeatedly to fund defence and much else. But we know a lot of Andy Burnham's soft left-backers, the people who've been with him from day one of this return mission, that's one of their big us.

9:58Patrick Maguire: Like, let's start spending more money on development. So lots of big decisions on the personnel and the policy that, as I write in my column, for all the mood of goodwill that is pervading the Labour Party at the surface, it won't take much for, one day soon, this period of maximum leverage and maximum sycophancy will be over and people will, you know, there'll be loses from the choices Andy Burnham makes. On that point you're making on David Miliband, what's really interesting is that people are using his work on aid and his interest in foreign aid against him. They are pointing out we are in a different era now.

10:33This isn't the era we're cutting the foreign aid budget. Can you really have a foreign secretary who is such a proud, outward proponent of increasing foreign aid in this job? And they're saying, therefore, he is unsuitable as a result of that nudge, nudge, wink, wink. And so it goes on. And that's the kind of level of these quite caustic briefings that we're on the end of this week. And again, it all feeds back to the fact that no one knows what's going on. And look, some people are being really overt about it. Angela Rayner did a press conference last night in which she was basically saying that it was a kind of love letter to Andy Burnham, but it was your agenda is my agenda and my agenda is your agenda.

11:10And the suggestions are she wants her old job back in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. But it's a very overt pitch and that spoke to something really interesting with Angela Rayner actually and we're going to get more into this in the weekend because not so long ago she was being talked up as a potential successor to Keir Starmer and then when the move and everyone went to Andy Burnham she wasn't there with it and now she finds herself as someone who on paper is an archetype of a Burnham minister. She you know is a good friend with him, she was pictured at his house not so long ago.

11:44Their policy agendas are remarkably similar. On paper, she should be in the Burnham Cabinet. But actually, there is an argument that some make that she missed the moment. She didn't go down on bended knee and provide the support when others did, like Louise Haig, Anne-Lise Mitzi and others. And as a result, she's in a weaker position. Now, I'm sure she'll probably end up with a very good cabinet job. But she doesn't know either. She doesn't know what she's getting. And also, the mere fact that her moment never came is a reflection of, OK, you mentioned two of them there, to that list I had there, Miliband.

12:12The people that made this happen for Andy Burnham, the people that made that return happen for Andy Burnham are all fans of Angela Rayner on a personal level. They like her. They know her well. They've worked with her closely. If those people we've mentioned wanted Angela Rayner or thought Angela Rayner was the candidate, it would have happened. It didn't happen for however many number of reasons. Those people chose to wait and make Andy Burnham Prime Minister instead, which I think tells you something about why Angela Rayner is not as intimately involved in this conversation or as prominent in this conversation as we may have unthinkingly assumed.

12:47you know as you say two great Manchester MPs on the record as liking each other a couple of members of each other broadly you know closer to each other than they were to certainly Keir Starmer's number 10 but I think I'll tell you that that sort of that fact of the personalities I think tells you why we are where we are with Angela Rayner and one other thing we need to talk about is how Andy Burnham sees all of this so from all the readouts I'm getting he's actually quite affronted by how transactional. So he's, how is Andy Byrne spending his days? He is trying to meet every Labour MP just about, and every minister.

13:23He's having one-on-ones in Port Carlos House, just over there, in his office, in a WIT's office that's been given to him for this period of time. And when he's sitting there, some of them are just very direct about the jobs they want and why they'd be really good in those jobs. And it's kind of like a what have you got for me thing. And he's quite taken aback by that. You know, it shouldn't surprise him. He is a child of Westminster he was well versed in it but it is nonetheless quite a front team and you got a hint of it in the speech earlier this week when he talks about you know all this speculation about who's going to be chosen well people are speculating because everyone's talking about it and it matters it's such an important thing but he clearly doesn't like that side of it as much as he is the arbiter of all the power at the same time well yeah you know and when he spoke in his speech in which i was at on monday he spoke of westminster feeling you know more fractured more unhappy and you know you can't you can't help but think he was probably thinking of some of the meetings he had with them just the desperate the sheer desperation of mps yeah i compared some of them in my column to sort of you know ambulance chasing personal injury lawyers all sort of banging on andy birdham's car door saying you know i can leave you to a battle more riches in the department for paper clips of you, you know, sign the dotted line, sign the dotted line with me.

14:38And from every one of these meetings where Andy Burnham is seeing groups from MPs, you know, you get, I certainly have, you know, at least one of them coming out and saying, you won't believe who just disgraced himself, you know, to preserve the integrity of one of my sources, I'll boulder this story slightly. But, you know, someone told me he was in a meeting early this week, at which a minister gave him a gloopy, obsequious welcome, basically saying, if there's anything I can do, et cetera, et cetera. You know, it's so great. Let me formally welcome you. And I haven't escaped the notice of this minister's colleagues that a glut of briefings had appeared in the press suggesting that they might be in line for a cabinet job.

15:16So it's certainly making the Parliamentary Labour Party fractured unhappy because they're all looking at each other thinking, well, you're disgracing yourself. You're embarrassing yourself. I certainly wouldn't behave like that. But there's also this mental undertow in all of their heads of, should I be doing that? You know, I had lunch with someone earlier in the week. he was saying you know i don't want to do this i don't want to pitch myself shamelessly to andy but i'm gonna have to because everybody else is and then you're having people pitching policy ideas and realizing you know i'm not going to meet andy i'm going to meet one of his uh one of his uh you know prior torian guard in the primary parliamentary labor party which is a disappointing people and this will be an important thing right because the this sort of uh lobbying etc won't stop this desperation won't stop once Andy Burnham has appointed his government.

16:03But what Keir Starmer never had until quite late on, until sort of he appointed Amy Richards as a political secretary and they sort of belated he got the importance of treating the parliamentary Labour Party like they were human beings. You know, he is going to need, I've had this from several ministers, you know, and influential backbenchers, you know, as long as there is some sort of structure where MPs can feel like they're heard, as long as they know who to speak to, and as long as they feel like they're listened to and frankly in some cases that will involve a member of the number 10 team or a minister sitting and furrowing their brow merely pretending to listen um yeah that could that can go a long way as will you know decisive leadership and uh you know a personable style so it's not intractable for Andy Burnham but it will be difficult and look the last thing we wanted to give you a flavor of is how weird it is to report on this period because essentially we're in the middle of two things a long goodbye and a long hello so you've got Keir Starmer doing a sequence of barbecues where he's saying MPs and saying goodbye to all his loyal aides there seems to be quite three or four of these it's quite an unusual intensity and at the same time you've got Andy Burnham taking his time to appoint his cabin out he's doing an interview this evening on one of the radio stations and that's gonna suck an enormous amount of oxygen because people are desperate to hear everything he's got to say and what that means is you end up in a state of paralysis in government.

17:23And it is paralysis. I'm going to give you two things. I promised I wouldn't talk about the defence investment plan, but I'm going to. So Keir Starmer announced this defence investment plan with£15 billion of funding. But then it unraveled within minutes when a table was published in one of the annexes in the small prim, which revealed that£4.7 billion of that is to be found at the next budget, Andy Burnham's budget. So that's a black hole immediately in the plans. Andy Burnham's going to have to find that money and then 10.3 billion of that is from largely as yet unidentified cuts across government cuts to hospitals cuts to schools we don't know and it's all going to be Andy Burnham's decision to make and we don't know where that's going to be made so that is one form of paralysis you've had a kind of symbolic commitment to increasing defence funding without any of the actual meat on the bone of where that money is going to be coming for it's almost built on sand the whole thing it's uh not a great place to be in and the other one is the rochdale grooming gangs and everybody currently is looking to a a you know tweet from andy burnham in which he says this guy should be deported but nothing should be off the table is but is that andy burnham saying i'm going to reopen the echr or is that andy burnham just i don't know i'm at a press release like we don't know who's enacting that because this is a now problem this guy is on the streets now presumably people in government are looking at it but everyone's looking to Andy Burnham for what would you do about it?

18:45Yeah, exactly. And in that tweet, he said, I'll be asking the Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary to do this. Which Home Secretary? Do you mean now? Do you mean you're going to ask as a local MP? Or is it the Foreign and Home Secretary you appoint on the 20th of July? David Miliband. Yeah, exactly. Who knows? And that's the point, that everything is kind of very uncertain. And it means that the news agenda is very unpredictable as well. So, I mean, look, normally when there's a big story, we would go directly to the departments that are relevant to us and what they think about it, where things are.

19:15At the moment, there is a single point of power, and that is Andy Burnham and whatever is inside his head. And there are very few people that know the answer to that question. Yeah, indeed. I think we can safely say it's probably no more than five. Yeah. OK, well, look, until next week, thank you again for listening. Patrick, can you do the honours with the big red button? Yeah, thank you very much, as ever, to our superlative producers, Molly Guinness, Ewan Daughtry and Harry Kitson for making us sound presentable and look even better.