Echo Comment on Andy Burnham’s by-election victory

At a time when Labour is polling at 19 per cent, he won 55 per cent of the vote. He beat all the combined forces of the right – Reform, Restore and the Conservatives – although he did so by stealing Reform’s slogan: a vote for me is a vote to get rid of Starmer.

So while this must be seen as a big personal vote for the mayor of Manchester, it must also be seen as a big personal vote against the Prime Minister? For all his achievements in and out of politics, Sir Keir Starmer comes across as mild-mannered, a bit bland and quite ineffectual. On the foreign stage, he has done pretty well – probably the only party leader who would not have gone to war with Donald Trump.

Yet in some quarters, he is absolutely hated, as our letters page shows on an almost daily basis. The vote in Makerfield also shows that.

So to prevent the infighting that bedevilled the Tories, Mr Starmer’s last act as PM is to find a dignified way to hand power to Mr Burnham.

But before he does that, Mr Burnham has to show he has an agenda to change Britain. Just fluttering his lavish eyebrows will not make the problems Mr Starmer faces go away. Debt, defence spending, cost of living, social care, immigration – what are his answers to any of them?

It is said that one of his closest allies is Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, yet in Aberdeen South, where the Tories made their first by-election gain in Scotland since 1967, his energy policy was massively repudiated. So will Mr Burnham stick with it, or will he change it?

At the moment, the Burnham bubble looks large and attractive, but bubbles without anything in them have a habit of going pop – and then where will that leave Labour and the country?