Andy Burnham braces for a stormy autumn following his golden summer

Few leaders have had as golden a summer as Andy Burnham. Heading off for a family break with his wife Marie-France van Heel and their trio of twenty-something offspring, Jimmy, Rosie and Anne-Marie, before settling fully into Number 10 and the official PM’s flat, he did not specify a destination, though it is thought to be a short-haul Europe trip for a brief recharge.

This week, it was back to Blighty, looking tanned as he hit the road on a national tour — in essence a chance to introduce himself to the many parts of the country outside his Manchester fiefdom where the Burnham brand is either unfamiliar or treated with the scepticism that accompanies a change of leader only two years after a general election that saw his predecessor shoot to power on the wings of a strong majority only to crash out in July.

If Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves proved a disappointment to the party and public, his successor is riding high, throwing off the gloom, political stasis and strategic uncertainty of the previous regime. Planet Burnham is a more pro-active place — driven by a character who believes in his own magic as a “people person”.

There have often been doubts about Burnham’s consistency and policy depth down the years. In 2009, I debated him on an LBC radio phone-in about healthcare — and left not much the wiser about how he thought the NHS should be run or how far he agreed with a public-private mix. He was health secretary at the time.

But he did make clear that social care, a challenge that has defeated many governments since, needed a full and expensive reform. Speaking movingly about the toll providing care for the elderly and other care recipients takes on their families was a reminder that the subject that moved him a decade and half ago is now his to resolve in power.

No one doubts now that Burnham has forged a ruthless path to the top. First, by putting his stamp on the Greater Manchester mayoralty; then, in a cheeky affront to Starmer, by turning up the heat on his leadership at party conference last September. Then we saw his determination to fight a by-election and how he wielded his political gamesmanship to get through the Starmerite resistance to that to win a parliamentary seat in Makerfield. “They said it couldn’t be done” is his mantra.

Seeing the Labour candidate Bev Craig hang onto the mayoralty he vacated — trouncing Reform UK — in early August concluded an impressive spread of internal victories and confounded many who underestimated him as just “nice Andy”.

He has instructed ministers to ensure two of those responsible for the death of Pc Andrew Harper, killed by a getaway car after trying to arrest a teenage gang of quad bike thieves, are excluded from the government’s early release scheme — despite initial concerns about direct political involvement in determining who is and is not released and worries about the consequences of rapidly abandoning a policy intended to avoid prison capacity being exceeded as soon as October.

Burnham counters that he is “not giving up” and is “increasingly confident” that the pair’s release can be halted. A less edifying view came from the Tory justice spokesman Chris Philp, who posted on X that this zigzag was a sign of policy chaos on criminal judgment at the heart of the government. And even Burnham conceded: “I am doing all I can, but it is simply not possible to prevent all offenders from being released early without the prison system collapsing.”

Clearly, he intends to marry the “soft Left” progressive language and positions he used to build a power base with tougher stances on issues he knows can easily unleash an avalanche for a centre-Left government if it is seem to move too far from public opinion.

So according to those familiar with his thinking, he will also focus on immigration and asylum and revisit the welfare reforms that defeated Starmer.

Burnham knows that this summer of love is a short lease and that the battle over economic competence with the Tories and with Reform on social and culture war issues will begin in earnest when Parliament reconvenes.

For now, Labour has edged a couple of points ahead of Reform on around 24 per cent to its 22 per cent with the Tories skimming 21 per cent on poll averages in August.

He polls relatively strongly on personal popularity — up to a 12-point lead in the latest YouGov sample, while Nigel Farage has had a sharp drop to minus 20 points in the popularity charts. The hard part, however, is yet to come. A team of reshuffled ministers is facing a budget that needs to address a massive defence investment hole and many of the same problems that bedevilled Starmer: stagnant real-terms wages, sluggish productivity and an economy that still relies heavily on financial services and thus foreign investment. Yet the Burnham government, with a solid if conventional Chancellor, John Healey, is steadily defining itself as more protectionist in tone with talk of “Buying British” in defence and consumer preferences.

For many economists, that is at odds with the aim of driving more efficiencies. From plans to keep energy bills down in the autumn by skimming Whitehall budgets to capping bus fares and cutting business rates for pubs, the focus has been on giveaways rather than a clear mission or vision to re-start UK growth. Even Lord O’Neill, the banker who was happy to advise Burnham, looks less keen on some of the wealth tax ideas popular in the team around him. O’Neill has told me he himself has “lots of other things to do” — suggesting he may not be keen on a full role in the Burnham economic hierarchy.

The focus on a major devolution plan has seen officials and ministers scuttling off to the symbolic “Number 10 North” new base. But any gains devolution might bring will be years off and are speculative.

And as the Institute for Fiscal Studies put it, in a reality check to the Burnhamite creed of spreading investment and opportunity beyond the South, “Under current plans, total public spending will continue to grow over this parliament. Taxes are due to rise by even more, allowing borrowing to fall and debt to stabilise. Despite a growing state, spending on public services will remain tight.”

The early Burnham response to a sea of fiscal troubles following the relative calm of a summer has been to make his mark on the ministerial personnel in a purge dubbed “Starmergeddon” among those who fell victim to a swingeing reshuffle.

There have been major winners, notably Healey himself and new Defence Secretary Wes Streeting, who unleashed the first thunder rolls of a Cabinet tempest that ultimately swept Starmer from office. But both are going to carry heavy burdens: Healey having accused Starmer of failing to fund the country’s defences, but who now faces the task of closing a billion hole with broader public spending tensions.

Streeting is new to the international sphere. Health Secretary Yvette Cooper gets the job of wrangling NHS spending — while Streeting, her predecessor, will compete with his old department for funds to ramp up UK security.

Watching Ed Miliband, the new foreign secretary, give a bravura speech at a party hosted by the Left-leaning IPPR as ministers allowed themselves a couple of giddy nights out on roof terraces overlooking the Thames was a reminder of how much has been upended. Miliband, on the eve of a trip to Washington and fresh from his first meeting with Marco Rubio, Donald Trump’s Secretary of State, joked about his own failed PM ambitions in 2016 and the days when he had thought “pre-distribution” a good campaign phase. “Don’t go there Andy.”

One on the rise in the new era at the heart of the labyrinthine Cabinet Office at 70 Whitehall is Louise Haigh, the woman who ruthlessly deployed the soft-Left base to bring Burnham to power. She is now chief coordinator of the Burnham project. A Sheffield MP firmly positioned on the left end of the new PM’s spectrum, Haigh is opposed to upgrading the nuclear deterrent and nominated Jeremy Corbyn as leader in 2016. Dismissal from her Cabinet role over a previously undisclosed minor conviction for fraud connected to loss of her mobile phone fired up Haigh to support an alternative to Starmer.

With Lisa Nandy, the stalwart Culture Secretary, she has provided the organisational heft for Burnham’s rise. Angela Rayner returns as Housing Secretary. Lucy Powell, the deputy leader who criticised Number 10’s inward culture, is installed at Education. These are sweet days for many who felt sidelined in the previous era — and who made the right bet on succession.

The message is not lost on MPs: loyalists to the Starmer project are out of favour, including Peter Kyle, the urbane ex-business and trade secretary, and Nick Thomas-Symonds, out as Europe minister, as well as Reeves, dispensed with as chancellor. She turned down a job (reportedly education) to regather her strength on the backbenches. It has also been a period of relentless self-promo from a PM whose videos and posts carry messages, silly on the surface, but which segues into political messaging into millions of apps. A “pub snacks” competition with his Chancellor was intended to show that they are a snug duo with close personal relations, even if choices of salty comestibles may vary.

Sarah Brown, who previously ran Sadiq Khan’s communications and will run No 10’s media relations, has been encouraged to dilute the bloke-ish timbre of the summer’s social media onslaught.

But as one insider in the government’s new media strategy unit puts it, “If it travels, it works.” More than three million people watched a video in which the PM talked earnestly about parity between the “hard hat” of the building site and the “mortar board” of graduate esteem.

I gather Burnham has, as a family in-joke, saved to his phone a TikTok clip of his arrival in Downing Street with the Love Island announcement: “A hot new bombshell has entered the villa.” Beneath that self-deprecating fun, there’s not much false modesty: he entered the No 10 villa, he reckons, because he will be better at the job than the last resident. When the summer glow-up fades, he will need to prove that he is about more than stardust, as the choices come hard and fast.