Being a skilled communicator is not enough. The incoming prime minister needs a clearer political direction Daily Telegraph 19/07/26 There is something peculiar about the coronation of Andy Burnham. It is not just that his ascension is without historical parallel. Or that it has occurred against the backdrop of a prime minister falling within two years after winning the third-largest majority in over a century. It is that we are about to get a prime minister and yet know very little about what we are getting. To be fair to Burnham, he did give a speech early on returning to Westminster. He has talked about rolling back “40 years of Thatcherism”. We hear much about “Manchesterism”. There’s a promise for “growth in every postcode”. However, journalists didn’t get the chance to ask him questions. And there’s not much in the way of detail. Clive Lewis – one of his earliest public supporters – has criticised U-turns made by Burnham. Positions on Waspi, rejoining the EU, immigration ...
Even given the low bar set by recent prime ministers, it was a shockingly poor speech from Labour’s new leader Daily Telegraph 17/07/26 Was that it, then, the great reveal, the sum total of Andy Burnham’s plan for a more hopeful Britain? A paean to Neil Kinnock, of all people, the failed socialist Labour leader turned Eurocrat extraordinaire ? An almost dementedly egotistical claim that his own coronation, and the death warrant to “neoliberalism” it supposedly entails, heralds “the most significant change moment in our politics for 40 years” – apparently more momentous even than the supply-side revolution, Big Bang, Blairism, 9/11, devolution, the rise of the Blob, the financial crisis, the expenses scandal, Brexit, Covid and the emergence of populism? If that might be dismissed as just a little presumptuous, what about our incoming Prime Minister’s explicit repudiation of the 1980s, and thus of the consumerism, individual liberation, social mobility, mass home and asset ownership and ...