Nothing we have seen over the past seven weeks suggests Andy Burnham is proper Downing Street material.
Yet even by the underwhelming standards he has set since coming to power, he has let himself down badly by allowing the Green Party to dictate his actions.
On Saturday, the Daily Mail reports that the Prime Minister has postponed plans to approve drilling at the North Sea’s Jackdaw gas field until after next month’s Holborn and St Pancras by-election.
It doesn’t require the services of a mind reader to work out that he fears a backlash from eco-zealots who could help Greens leader Zack Polanski win the seat vacated by Sir Keir Starmer.
The move speaks volumes about Mr Burnham’s blinkered outlook and (lack of) leadership qualities. But it also says much about his contempt for the people who pay his wages.
Delaying the Jackdaw announcement will have real consequences for job creation and Britain’s energy security. Yet Mr Burnham has clearly decided that these can be sacrificed – at least temporarily – on the altar of political expediency of the most cynical kind.
That it comes after Labour’s move to impose sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank – a move largely designed to curry favour with pro-Gaza fanatics in the environmental lobby – only adds insult to injury.
It begs the question as to who is really calling the shots in No10 and whether the PM is, in fact, effectively letting us be governed by proxy by the Greens.
Everyone knows that the British public didn’t vote to put Mr Burnham in charge of the country. But neither did anyone choose to give the job to Mr Polanski.
The Prime Minister has postponed plans to approve drilling at the North Sea’s Jackdaw gas field until after next month’s Holborn and St Pancras by-election
A very shoddy Bill
Regardless of where they stand in the assisted dying debate, everyone directly affected deserves a sympathetic hearing.
But there can be little doubt that the Bill rejected in Westminster yesterday was deeply flawed. Among its many shortcomings was a failure to offer adequate protection to the elderly, disabled and other vulnerable groups.
Now that it has been thrown out of Parliament, we can a breathe a sigh of relief and hope it has been consigned for good to the legislative dustbin. But it is frightening that it came within a whisker of being passed in the Commons.
The narrow margin in yesterday’s vote doesn’t reflect well on our MPs. And the fact that such a shoddy piece of work made it as far as it did is a very bad look indeed for Labour.
MPs voted by 286 to 270, a majority of 16, to reject the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill at its Second Reading
Catalogue of errors
The litany of sickening migrant crime continues.
In the latest case, Rasheed Rahman – a 21-year-old Sudanese national who arrived here in the back of a lorry – stabbed a grandfather to death in a random attack.
Rahman had been bailed by police two days earlier after punching and kicking passers-by on a canal towpath.
Although he had been involved in several violent incidents, he was given the knife used in the fatal attack by accommodation support staff. It also emerged that he had previously made a successful asylum application.
This catalogue of errors raises all sorts of questions that need answers. But the most pressing one is this: what exactly does Mr Burnham intend to do about the migrant crisis?
Rasheed Rahman murdered grandfather Mark Carroll on 10 April 2024 in park in Camden, London
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