\n<\/p>\n
\u201cW<\/span>henever Westminster has gone into a moment,\u201d Andy Burnham lamented in one of his many interviews this week, \u201cI have somehow been drawn into it.\u201d Yeah, we\u2019re all trying to find the guy who did this. Why is this happening to Andy Burnham, this fevered speculation that Labour\u2019s Iron Throne has his name on it, which is now causing cabinet ministers, the prime minister and maybe even the bond markets to overtly or covertly slag him off? \u201cI think what we\u2019ve got to do,\u201d Andy thought in another interview, \u201cis to stop the sense in Westminster at times that everything is in flux.\u201d Counterpoint: the sense in Westminster is that everything is completely and utterly fluxed. The wider country is considerably less optimistic.<\/p>\n Yet is Andy Burnham the answer? The Greater Manchester mayor would certainly appear to reckon so, having worked tirelessly this week to give himself pre-title billing at his party\u2019s imminent gathering in Liverpool. Yup, here he comes \u2013 the King of the North, the cock of the conference, the memoji of Manchester \u2013 as unafraid to chat shit to those bond markets as he was to give that press conference in that jacket in that pandemic. The worry is that Andy is just one of those things that, during Covid, people thought were very good, but now realise are actually very bad. Like incipient alcoholism or Ted Lasso.<\/p>\n Maybe Burnham is less bad than Keir Starmer, which isn\u2019t exactly the Kitemark, but also not the same as having a plan. Certainly, nobody is as bad as Britain\u2019s problems, which is the main light flashing on the dashboard, and none of Burnham\u2019s proposals thus far \u2013 some nationalisation and some wealth taxes \u2013 touch the sides of them.<\/p>\n In fairness, he\u2019s not offering a policy platform at this stage, the stage where he\u2019s implying he wants to be prime minister, not how he wants to be prime minister. It\u2019s more of a vibe \u2013 if not to all tastes within the parliamentary Labour party. Consider the MP who told HuffPost: \u201cKeir should say to him, \u2018Any time you want, Andy, there\u2019ll be a seat for you, and I want you in government.\u2019 He\u2019d shit himself. People would see how useless he is.\u201d Housing secretary Steve Reed is another one who seems somehow unkeen on Andy making a conference entrance like the North Face Kylo Ren, describing Burnham as a \u201cregional politician\u201d, and warning against the risk of division. Risk division at this upcoming Labour conference? No spoilers, but it\u2019s just possible we might have passed that particular event horizon.<\/p>\n Disappointing interjections like these seem to have been part of what sent Burnham back to the microphone: \u201cI gave an honest answer and sometimes it feels to me that the Westminster world can\u2019t deal with those answers.\u201d Yeah, they can\u2019t handle his truth. This is the Westminster world in which Burnham previously served loyally as a Blairite, a Brownite, a Corbynite and even a Starmerite, but he\u2019d like you to know he\u2019s been a long time out of that \u2026 swamp, would you call it? Certainly the insult \u201cWestminster\u201d is recurring increasingly often in Burnham\u2019s pitch. I can\u2019t bear the thought of him finding out where he\u2019s going to have to work if his dream comes true.<\/p>\n Then again, despite the week bringing this new drama, it\u2019s hard for anyone who has lived through the past decade of political turmoil in the UK not to feel there are at least familiar elements here. Having extracted my memories of the 2017 and 2018 Conservative party conferences from the coffin of earth I\u2019d nailed them into, I am transported back to those times when some guy made both events absolutely all about him and his will-he-won\u2019t-he leadership bid. As you might recall, the guy was Boris Johnson, fannying about like the blancmange Uncle Scar, driving half the attenders mad with political lust and the other half just mad. The then Henley MP John Howell spoke for a significant chunk of his colleagues at the 2017 Tory conference when he said: \u201cMy message to Boris is to keep his bloody mouth shut.\u201d By the 2018 conference, many had become so openly weary of the Johnson manoeuvring that Howell ramped up to: \u201cAs far as I\u2019m concerned, Boris can just fuck off.\u201d In the 2019 Conservative leadership contest John Howell would vote \u2013 obviously, obviously \u2013 for Boris Johnson. Henley is currently represented by the Liberal Democrats.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sign up to Matters of Opinion<\/span><\/p>\n Guardian columnists and writers on what they\u2019ve been debating, thinking about, reading, and more<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n This is the country we\u2019ve lived in for a very, very long time now \u2013 a place of endless churn, trending in the direction of seismic. We either get inadequate chancers (eg Johnson or Liz Truss) or chance inadequates (eg Theresa May, Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer), all of whom are forever being presented as the next true hope. We last drew one off the chance-inadequates pile, so maybe next time round it\u2019s fated to be an inadequate chancer \u2013 a casting call Nigel Farage could definitely nail.<\/p>\n Andy Burnham belongs to the other pile, I think. But after the past week, and forgive this dip into Premier League history books, I now find it impossible to hear him giving it the full King of the North without thinking of Alex Ferguson\u2019s dismissal of Paul Ince as a \u201cbig time Charlie\u201d. Alas, some associative synaptic glitch means I now cannot hear the words \u201cKing of the North\u201d without my brain changing them into \u201cthe Guv\u2019nor\u201d \u2013 a nickname that Ince bestowed upon himself, admittedly, while Andy\u2019s was fitted to him by the media. And you know, Ince was probably underrated \u2013 don\u2019t write in \u2013 so maybe that bodes well \u2026<\/p>\n Even so, I did feel a tightening in my jaw when Andy informed the BBC this week that a tilt at the top job would need to be \u201cmore than a personality contest\u201d. A personality contest between Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham? I guess we are where we are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWhenever Westminster has gone into a moment,\u201d Andy Burnham lamented in one of his many interviews this week, \u201cI have somehow been drawn into it.\u201d Yeah, we\u2019re all trying to find the guy who did this. Why is this happening to Andy Burnham, this fevered speculation that Labour\u2019s Iron Throne has his name on it,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23983,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[14597,14599,2139,14598,14596,13630,3982],"class_list":{"0":"post-23982","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics","8":"tag-antics","9":"tag-hyde","10":"tag-king","11":"tag-marina","12":"tag-norths","13":"tag-remind","14":"tag-wont"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23982\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}