Andy Burnham’s trivial pursuits – spiked

On 12 August, UK prime minister Andy Burnham convened an immediate sitting of the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms (commonly referred to as COBRA). This is the committee that tends to deal with national emergencies: terror attacks, pandemics, riots and that kind of thing. What had happened this time? Ebola in Ebbsfleet? A nuke in Nuneaton?

No, Burnham had gathered his entire suite of national-security advisers together to issue a Very Important Announcement. It was to tell retailers not to sell disposable barbecues to members of the public during the current spell of warm summer weather, as they had a mind-numbingly obvious potential to cause fires in dry areas.

Then, just to reinforce the scale of the threat, an ‘emergency’ alert was sent to every smartphone in the country, warning citizens definitely not to buy and then grill a single open-air bratwurst or chipolata. As emergency proclamations go, it’s hardly ‘this country is at war with Germany’, is it?

This is small beer (or small sausages) indeed, but it’s all part of a much wider – and sadly deliberate – pattern. Since seizing power in July, Burnham has made a habit of presenting legislative molehills as mountains, laying out a whole litany of the most insignificant ‘policy’ announcements ever known to man.

We’ve had Andy giving people an average of 86p off their electricity bills each week (temporarily, for six months) in order to ‘bring back hope’. We’ve had Andy capping bus fares at a maximum of £2 per journey, in order to ‘build a country for everyone, everywhere’ (except those who don’t live on a bus route). We’ve even had Burnham introduce regulations to force companies to provide consumers with ‘clearer up-front information’ about the precise small-print exit-term conditions of subscription services – this to ‘give people hope that politics really can work for them and their everyday lives’.

Embarrassingly, this is only the beginning of a rolling programme of similar ‘everyday fixes’ Burnham has planned for his realm. Many of the quotidian quibbles Burnham intends to address sound like deliberate jokes. Some poor civil servant actually had to type out an entire document pledging to restrict garish shopfront signage. Apparently, the government will be working together with the Planning Advisory Service ‘to show what good high street design looks like in practice – taking inspiration from high street success stories like Cross Street in Oswestry and Keynsham High Street’ in Somerset. Imagine waking up every morning and being able to walk contentedly through an area that strongly resembles Keynsham High Street. It’s precisely what the entire country has been crying out for.

It all makes John Major’s notoriously low-stakes Cones Hotline idea look like the Marshall Plan. Meanwhile, the country’s borders continue to collapse, migrant mega-dinghies roll in, the power network teeters on the edge of blackouts, the national debt balloons and there are riots on the streets.

At least Nero had the decency to play a fiddle while Rome burned, and give people a bit of entertainment. The best Burnham can muster is to sit in a pub with his new chancellor, as they ‘hilariously’ rank which bar snacks they like best for YouTube. ‘They used to make KP nuts in Rotherham’, says John Healey, at one point in the video. Isn’t there something slightly more important that has been happening in Rotherham lately that your government should be focussing on, John?

It is easy to mock, but Burnham does have a problem here. Besides temporary BBQ bans and discount bus fares, the prime minister has floated some more substantial policy proposals, from a compulsory ‘death tax’ to introducing proportional representation and a new ‘national care service’. Yet each time he does so, he hits up against an obvious hurdle – none of these things appeared in the Labour Party manifesto of his General Election-winning predecessor, Sir Keir Starmer. As a result, he has no electoral mandate whatsoever to do any of them.

Therefore, until the next election, Andy is faced with a dilemma. He could go ahead and try the big things with zero authority from the electorate to do so. Or he could continue down his current path of focussing exclusively on a plethora of micro-level trivialities, like whether or not Twiglets are better than pork scratchings. Whichever path he chooses, he’ll suffer reproach either way. He cannot win. It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for him.

Except for one thing. Nobody forced Burnham into this position. Nobody made him stand to be prime minister with no clear mandate, and no clear idea what to do with his office once he gained it. It was his own personal towering ego that made him do all that. The one thing about Andy that was never trivial was his own sense of self-entitlement and self-regard.

Trivial Pursuit is meant to be just a game, not a model for governing a whole country.

Steven Tucker is a writer whose work is published frequently in outlets in the US and UK. His latest book is Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science.