The Burnham Bounce: how long can it last?

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0:41Patrick Maguire: Andy Burnham's first week has been decisive and optimistic. There's a Burnham bounce in the polls, and now he's starting on some massive political decisions, all bringing their own bear traps. So just how long can this honeymoon last?

0:59Patrick Maguire: Hello and welcome to The State of It, the political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times. As you may have noticed, I'm not Stephen Swinford. It's me, Patrick Maguire, and my usual co-conspirators, Steve and Lara, are off this week. You can tell it's the parliamentary recess, but fans of the original line-up of this podcast are in for a treat because I'm joined by none other than Gabriel Pogran, the Insight Editor of The Sunday Times. Gabriel, it's great to have you back. thank you um i did worry with uh the fall of kia sarma that the time for blokey football analogies would be over but given that andy burnham was elected i hope i'm permitted to say that i feel a little bit like sort of aiden hazard partaking in a football podcast today like i was in lobby land i i thought i was at the top of my game and then my legs left me i put on a bit of way and I just exited stage left.

1:52I've had nothing to do really with like lobby reporting for a few months. Yeah, you're retired from the day-to-day grind of political reporting. So I've kind of come here to learn from the goat what is going on in Burnham's number 10.

2:06Patrick Maguire: Well, what is going on in politics this week? I think that's a big question. And already we're speaking on Tuesday. I think the contours of the political debate have already been set. when we look back at the end of this week, when we sit down in the Times Parliamentary Office to write our Saturday read, I think the opening sentence or certainly a big chunk of it will be the week the polls turned because we've had three opinion polls so far this week, one from YouGov for the Times, one from Servation and another from More in Common. and all of them show something that we had long forgotten was even theoretically possible.

2:48Patrick Maguire: For the first time since April 2025, a party other than reform is in the lead in those opinion polls. Now, first things first, worth saying, these are not the sort of leads that guarantee Labour a total landslide. In YouGov's poll, they've drawn level pegging. Indeed, you've got Labour on 22%, reform on 22 % and the Tories on 21%. So that's all within the margin of error, a statistical dead heat. You've got the Greens collapsing in some polls. So it looks like we're looking at even a week in to Andy Burnham's premiership. He's only been Prime Minister for eight days. Something of a realignment in British politics.

3:32And it's really striking. I guess if you look at a lot of the appointments from the PPS level up to the cabinet, Burnham's made no secret of his desire to part with Starmer and Starmerism. In terms of the first seven days of this administration, what has surprised you in terms of the way that Burnham has approached it?

3:55Patrick Maguire: It's a really interesting question. And what's leapt out at me is the transformative power that clear and decisive leadership and a sense of political identity at the top have had. And I think that is your golden ticket to achieving quite a lot, even in this fragmented, polarizing, noisy political environment. I think we underestimate the role of agency, right? And we, you know, if we think about why Nigel Farage has led in the polls for a year, and indeed we'll still be leading in some of those polls and reform be leading the polls, it's because they had a leader who showed agency, right? Why did Polanski burn so brightly for a bit?

4:36Patrick Maguire: Again, unlike Keir Starmer, he showed agency, right? And you can point to, it's funny, there was a paper, I think I mentioned this on the podcast the other day, that circulated in number 10 about high agency politicians, politicians who break the scroll. That was the phrase used by cabinet ministers. And for a long time, Labour didn't have one. But Andy Burnham said something to me when I was speaking to him that Sunday before he went in. So about 10 days ago now, he said, I'm going to try and do things in a different way. And I have no doubt of his sincerity, the clarity of his intent. But the question I always had, and I remember asking him this earlier in Makerfield as well, on the campaign trail.

5:14Patrick Maguire: How do you ensure you don't go to London, right? Once you've put a suit on, you're chewed up by the system. Whitehall is still a bit of a mess. You know, the system closes ranks. It stops you being you, all the obligations of office. And he returns this phrase several times, I want to do things a different way. And they have, in a very literal sense, done things in a different way, right? When we just say, by the way, breaking the mold, that means like he's not done traditional press conferences he's and done done far more shorts on social media than he has uh you know inquisitorial sit-downs or subjected himself to the uh you know firing squad of lobby or the press pack he did a laura koonsberg interview which was being transmitted tonight but is that what you're saying in terms of his communications approach it's not been starmer in the wood paneled uh press gallery behind the door of number 10 taking questions from the political editors and it's just been totally outside that template is that yeah exactly and it's not been uh you know the big announcement is embargoed till 10 p.m right which means that it can be on the front page the times or any other paper you know they talk about on the 10 o 'clock news it's in the news the next morning you know and everyone's everyone's seen it everyone's a bit bored of it what they've been doing is they've been releasing stories for a number of reasons some of the market sensitive uh some for logistical reasons, some because of discussions with cabinet ministers, the stories have been coming out at 6am which means the nation has been waking up, you look at your phone bleary eyed and you see Andy Burnham has done X from the BBC News app or the Sky News app or whatever, or your Times app indeed and you're sort of bleary eyed, that's what the nation is waking up for, it drives conversation throughout the day, it's not a deliberate strategy to marginalise political media, the lobby, Westminster journalists, but it has succeeded in showing they can drive the conversation in a different way.

7:13Patrick Maguire: Now, let's see how that goes when they get into knotty policy questions like social care, which he's giving a speech on tomorrow. But in the space of a week, I think what you hear from within government, within number 10, within other departments, within the cabinet, within even the people who have fallen victim to this regime change, what all of them acknowledges, we at least know what this guy wants to do, right? He has a very clear sense of the what, he has a very clear sense of the why, the big question is the how. And, you know, we know how they want to communicate, you know, Louise Haig is getting good reviews from cabinet colleagues in terms of, you know, actioning stuff in discussions, gripping the operation.

7:57Patrick Maguire: From other parts of the cabinet, you get a degree of bewilderment like they're struggling to get anything out of number 10 far from it being the political engine room of a of a big government so there are lots of questions about the how how did they achieve this but in terms of political direction it's been very very clear indeed well actually just on that point so it's kind of a unusual time we're at the height of parliamentary recess a lot of people uh to the extent they aren't already probably even more switched off from the life and times of Westminster during the summer and yet you only get to introduce yourself to the country once and it seemed like in the first few days he was very much laser focused on cost of living and what he called the way of life our culture of pubs and entertainment venues and music and it was sort of quite well away from what he's going to turn to now which is social care and one of the great knotty policy questions of our time which you know louise casey was at pains to say the other day she hoped andy burnham would pick up and run with uh in short order but she was jumping up and down at keir starmer urging him at the outset of his administration to grip this and use the majority he had to do something about it but what are we to read from that because starmer certainly liked the idea of being mr fix it and being you know an action oriented politician talked about politics treading on our lives more lightly but like the idea that he was going to go in and in a kind of undemonstrative way fix big things so what do we derive from the fact that burnham is imminently now going to tackle one of the great unsolved dilemmas that's haunted British politics for basically three decades and hasn't been addressed at all.

9:51Patrick Maguire: The framing of your question reminds me of something David Blunkett said to me a couple of weeks ago when I interviewed him, you know, Burnham's a great mentor. And he said Burnham feels that he needed to convey a degree of optimism and dynamism in that first week. And the prime minister himself said to me, I'm not pretending that, you know, a two quid bus fare or a five off your energy bills a month or a grand off a pub's tax bill a year is going to be transformative and has solved everything. But it's about those sorts of moves are meant to convey to people that, yeah, I get it, right? And I can do something and I'll do a bit now.

10:31Patrick Maguire: This second week, in the words of Andy Burnham's team, is about those little things. These are the big things, right? So you've had first meeting with Zelensky, front page of this morning's times burnham's hardhat schools right that's massive educational reform you know skills education apprenticeships parity with academic qualification right massive big structural and cultural change and then we'll get social care as well and the social care thing i think is is the most essential though as you say not least because of the urgency but i think it's the most revealing thing about andy burnham right so is i think a it's a big unfinished business thing for him from from his time in hell yeah from his time in health right because and you know labor lose the 2010 election for lots of reasons but i would say you know if you to ask andy burner about that now he'd say you know what what is he doing in 2009 2010 right he's getting heckled by the cop of hillsborough uh that's a big political awakening moment for him And he's also trying to solve social care and the Tories kick it to bits, right?

11:38Patrick Maguire: They run ads that say RIP off, you know, reject Labour's death tax, right? And that's political knockabout that succeeds in knocking lasting social care reform into the long grass. I was speaking to someone in government about this last night who was saying this is going to be absolutely central to his premiership because of the really clear direction from him. The fact that he is expediting Louise Casey's report and not saying let's take a beat, let's convene a big cross party thing, let's bind people in from the start. The plan is in train. And the third thing is, it's going to expose him very quickly to his phrase, political capital, but also the need for actual capital.

12:21Patrick Maguire: He is running headfirst into a political minefield. Because immediately the questions are not just how you're going to pay for this. That's the entry level question. What happens when, as one of the people who will be involved in the implementation of all of this was saying to me yesterday, what happens when the King's Fund, the Wellcome Trust, the IFS, the NHS Confederation, whoever, you know, 10 former health secretaries come out and say, great idea, but actually the impacts on the NHS will be negligible, right? this is going to cost every household an extra 10 grand in tax or whatever. But it's not going to solve anything.

13:06Save the NHS.

13:07Patrick Maguire: Yeah, it's actually not going to save the NHS, or it's not going to deliver sort of savings you can take to the bank for the government. But what do you actually think happens to this government when the rubber does hit the road when it comes to really difficult policy decisions like social care, which as you outlined, there are massive stakeholders within the parliamentary party and out there in the country that could make life very difficult for him. And Burnham has, you know, in ways that are vaguely redolent of Corbyn's kinder, gentler politics, spoken so much about the idea that, you know, he's going to do away with traditional whipping.

13:42He wants to do things differently. What does that actually mean in pounds, shillings and pence when he has people from all sides saying, as they inevitably will, we don't like this or we've got the Treasury saying no can do?

13:56Patrick Maguire: Well, yeah, that is the question. Someone did say to me yesterday, people are in for a very rude awakening come September. Well, it wasn't just one person, right? Several people, including a good mix of people who are sympathetic to this project and feel badly let down and screwed over by this new political project. September is going to hit this government like a ton of bricks. you'll have parliamentary questions from the Tories every day you'll have a hyper engaged media Steve Swinford will be in this chair you know machine gunning them every day and it's a parliamentary party that has a very noisy minority of people who feel bruised who feel humiliated who feel like they don't want to do Andy Burnham any favours whatsoever, maybe Darren Jones will get on his hind legs and give a speech about fiscal responsibility.

14:55Patrick Maguire: And by that point, Labour have maintained this modest lead in the polls for a while. And the rest of the parliamentary Labour Party goes, shut up, Darren, don't care, whatever. Or maybe, actually they listen to that and say actually bang on you're right oh you know my constituency insert southeast marginal here i haven't really liked the sound of any of this what are we going to do about this uh oh i didn't get a job or i've been demoted or it's going to require andy burnham to maintain this sense of agency and initiative and he's also going to have to spend a lot of time fulfilling his promise to engage properly with people in a way that Keir Starmer never did, right?

15:45Patrick Maguire: He sent this long letter to Labour MPs early this month. And it was sort of like, if any of you are opening an envelope, I'll be the first person to turn up. You know, if it's just John McDonnell and Richard Bergen, you know, having a fag behind the bike sheds like that, I think that's a really important meeting and I'll be there, right? It was that sort of thing. And, you know, Annalise Midgley, the chief whip, wrote to MPs, yesterday saying, look at this broad-based, diverse team. There are members of the socialist campaign group in government, for instance. There are members of Progress, the Blairite group in government.

16:20Patrick Maguire: But, you know, as you say, when the rubber hits the road, all of these warm words are going to be tested. MPs are going to want to see action. And we've not yet seen a version of Andy Burnham as prime minister who's at the mercy of events. And I think that is the big danger in terms of political management, because that's when it always fell apart for Keir Starmer. Well, that leads us nicely into the break, after which we're going to talk about the other side of this coin, how are reform and the conservatives responding to the burn and bounce?

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17:27Patrick Maguire: Welcome back to The State of It. Gable, I've got to pull you up briefly before we get back into it. the style on this podcast, as you surely well remember, is interval. Even though Steve's not here, we go to the interval, we don't go to the break. And what a fine interval that was. What's the difference? Is break American? Well, I think, you know, interval just classier. Yeah, interval implies a sort of seaside theatrical experience, you know, an usher or an usherette coming with little ice creams. It's like I'm back watching the panto in the floral hall in Southport. But alas, we're not. We're here in Westminster studying the polls.

18:04Patrick Maguire: And let's talk about, as you said, the flip side of all this, which is where does this leave the right? Because I think a really important thing to remember about what's happening to Labour's number in the polls, it is not a case of Andy Burnham is coming for Nigel Farage's voters. Yes, there'll be cases of that at the margins, as there's always churn between parties. But I don't think that's the statistically significant thing that's happening here. Indeed, it's not. What Andy Burnham is doing is expanding Labour's coalition or rebuilding Labour's coalition. Andy Burnham wants to rebuild a traditional Labour coalition, which he is, or started to do on this basis.

18:51Patrick Maguire: But it is not the old Labour coalition. It is a newer Labour coalition, which is to say, who's losing out? It's the Greens who are being squeezed in our YouGov poll. The Green support among the very youngest voters, 18, 24-year-olds, went from 46 % to 26%, which I think is crazy. Labour's share of the vote among young voters has surged. The Greens are down, the Liberal Democrats are down that YouGov poll to their lowest number since before the 2024 election. And yes, if you look at reforms number, it has, it peaked a while ago and has been in a sort of steady-ish decline, not dramatic decline, but it's not like Andy Burnham is eating reforms lunch.

19:36Patrick Maguire: What he's doing is he's reuniting or appears to be reuniting the left. And that leaves the right with a big strategic decision to make of voters on the right because the prize now for reform is stay a clear second and the object lesson for voters on the right will be if you don't get behind one challenger to Andy Burnham, Andy Burnham wins the next election in a canter and that is the calculation for people on the right now. Which is basically, I mean that does turn on its head the whole story of politics over the last year if what you're saying is right you know until now it's been there's been this idea that politics is permanently fragmented but for what you just said basically burnham has a pretty he's got pretty singular communications abilities but also in some ways he's uh people said this about starboard but he's also a lucky general in some ways as well he's taken off his hot on the heels of a series of disclosures that have sort of sapped away at reform's momentum.

20:42He's been endowed with a fallible Green Party leader and a Lib Dem leader whose own party has severe misgivings and doubts about his own ability to kind of take the party further than its present share of the vote and its present intake of MPs. But essentially, what you're saying is if burnham can make good on this idea of cementing together those bricks and creating a proper progressive left liberal coalition then that totally changes the dynamic on on the right and where it might play into reform's hands it might actually up the urgency of their demand to tory voters to leave behind the conservatives and finally make that transition to reform equally it might just deepen the conservatives demand for the same and the conservatives keep saying that reform have peaked so what is your sense from only the early days of where this is

21:44Patrick Maguire: left nigel farage and and the conservatives look clearly this has been a time of friction and noise for reform and its uh relationship with uh the rest of the political mainstream But I think there is always a risk with reform of making a category error, of applying analysis that is at least a year out of date to them, right? So the consensus now is reform of peep, reform are done. You know, it's only a matter of time before we get Tory crossover. And then we're back to familiar two-party politics and Labour take on the Tories and the Tories win. Now, look, maybe that's going to happen. Look, last week, reform won a, and yes, it was a low turnout.

22:36Patrick Maguire: Yes, it was a police and crime commissioner election in Norfolk. But reform, having had a bad couple of months, a noisy couple of months, absolutely walloped the Tories in Norfolk. You know, the Tory vote absolutely collapses. And you sort of look at this and say, you know, Nigel Farage does have at least a quarter of the electorate on lock. And what he is doing now is, and this is why Clats is significant, he is working out how to speak to these people directly, what they think, gathering data, all of these things are out of sight and mind of his political. opponents, working out how to circumvent the usual channels of politics, the usual conventions of politics, breaking through those.

23:24Patrick Maguire: And that consolidates that part of the electoral forum. People are now saying, well, reform are never going to get to 35%, 40 % of the vote. In April 2025, August 2025, that was the conversation of reform. That's not the conversation of reform anymore because it's unlikely that anybody gets to 35 % of the vote anymore. So they are betting on a prolonged period of parties vying for the share of the vote that falls well short of what a government would traditionally hope to have achieved i mean there it was all very well that burnham burnham he would say this is going to unite all the left and liberal parties but presumably what you're saying there is reforms reform's position is predicated up to a point on the idea that you can still you're still going to be able to do big things on a local level up in our national political conversation with the share of the vote that is from the mid-20s to the low 30s.

24:23Patrick Maguire: Yeah, and that is just a rational response to the nature of our electoral system now, right? You know, we have, we'll have at least four parties, you know, certainly four, maybe five parties, all capable of winning more than 10 % of the vote and three possibly winning more than 20 % of the vote. So, you know, it's entirely rational now to say, well, actually, if we can do everything we can to optimise our hold on our core vote, which is quite chunky and also locks the Tories out of contention in big, big swathes of the country, then that is not a bad place to start from. I think the big test for reform, the big strategic test for reform is, let's say what we've seen in the polls this week is going to be sustained.

25:09Patrick Maguire: And the new state of affairs is, broadly speaking, Labour 28, reform between 25 and 26, the Tories around 20. There are people in reform who say, great, this is the EpiPen of adrenaline. And, you know, it'll get our mojo back, our insurgent energy back. And also, it's a clarifying moment for everybody else on the right, because we sort of need a by-election or two as an object lesson in this to see how the right respond, right? Because, you know, what happens if Labour are now capable of winning elections because of a split on the right? And you do wonder whether, okay, does that push people back into the territory where we're talking about a pact?

25:53Patrick Maguire: You know, reform aren't going away. and you know the polling the poll numbers have dipped a little bit they have not collapsed i mean using your own political imagination what actually is today if you were to surmise what it will end up being the likeliest sort of weak underbelly or bit of burnham's political persona or project that reform will in due course exploit because he's not jeremy corbyn he's obviously not is a totally different political proposition. What for you is like the bit of this Burnham project that is very vulnerable to kind of reform attack to the extent that, as you've said, Burnham's competing for their votes anyway, which he may not be?

26:35Patrick Maguire: Well, it's the fact that it's the Labour Party. I think that's ultimately the weakness. And the price for Farage is to say Andy Burnham is an unreconstructed Labour politician of the kind you've known recently. Right, so broadly speaking, right, his values don't align with yours. That's what he'd say to voters in the Northwest, in the Northeast, in those traditional Labour heartlands where Burnham polls very well. So the message is, he's weak on immigration. He's weak on welfare. He is going to tax you too high. He is not what he says he is. So it's about reminding people that he is a Labour politician.

27:16Patrick Maguire: It's actually a really fascinating and in some ways quite exciting political matchup because you have two people in Andy Burnham and Nigel Farage and also by the way in Kemi Badenock who are capable of mounting and sustaining a political argument in a really forceful way. So it is for the first time feels like a proper electoral prize fight and a battle of visions and for reform it's going to be really clarifying because they have an opportunity now to fight back as the insurgents. So another big prong of it will, of course, be like, this is a left-wing government. I mean, let's say all of these things are true in a year's time.

28:00Patrick Maguire: This is a successful left-wing government. You're a voter on the right. There's only one show in town and you might not like me, Nigel Farage, but your bank balance and the value of your house in Chingford or Billerickey and your sense of self do not like this successful Labour government. So are you really going to say you prefer Andy Burnham to me? I mean, and whether Nigel Farage is able to do that is the ultimate test of whether everything that's been happening recently has had the impact that his political opponents like to think it has. Yeah, it's interesting what you just said there. It's like Starmer's problem was he couldn't get things done.

28:42Whereas you're saying there could be one in which Farage's appeals even deeper. But you can say, well, look, they are giving effect to left-wing things that Burnham's unambiguous about wanting to achieve. And you don't want those things to happen to you. Well, I think that's all we've got time for. In this special edition of The State of It, it was lovely to be back. Good to have you.

29:03Patrick Maguire: So thanks very much to you and Daughtry, Molly Guinness. And if you're listening still, make sure you like, subscribe, and share this podcast wherever you get yours from.

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