The end of Starmer drama and the soap opera of coronation street – but who IS our next PM?

Andy Burnham likes a joke.

He can deliver them too, either sprinkled into his plentiful online videos or as a banter-foil to opposition jibes. Remember his cheeky smile on being told as he was sworn in as the MP for Makerfield that he wasn’t the Messiah and shot back the Python response – “naughty boy”, or the eye flutter before saying “it’s dark blue actually” after Kemi branded him “a black T-shirt and a pair of lashes”.

I make no judgement on the quality of comedy, the more important observation is that Starmer would dream of doing it, and couldn’t remotely carry it off if he tried.

I doubt the ‘King-in-the-North-in-Westminster’ will be in the chamber again for PMQs until we know it’s him on the front bench with, I’m told, quite a few new faces. In total victory he can afford to do Starmer a favour and not embarrass him by turning up- but as the lads might put it like the investiture of an ‘Archbishop of Banterbury’ – a target rich environment for Kemi Badenoch:

“I wonder if the real Prime Minister has turned up today? Where is he? Oh yes up there in the back benches. Perhaps he’d like to come down to the despatch box so I can ask him questions, otherwise this seems a waste of everyone’s time”

You get the picture.

So does this Northern cocktail of wry soliloquy and the lashes mean Burnham IS any better than Starmer?

The communication is – that wouldn’t have been hard – but the plan and the vision are potentially no better and possibly worse albeit a better told and sold story.

Perhaps Burnham’s penchant for the cheery quip and political joke is the reason he’s been the subject of one, for many years.

“A Blairite, a Brownite, a Milibandian, and a Corbynite walk into a pub and the landlord says, “what’ll it be Andy?”

Burnham has a such a long history of flexibility in his political postures he could host yoga sessions in this new Number 10 North.

And given political nerds like myself forget he’s not a household name in normal households (outside Manchester) when it comes to Andy Burnham the man, the myth, the Mancunian messiah the British public are entitled to steal a line from Nigel Farage’s ‘low grade bank clerk, damp rag speech:

“Who ARE you?”

Because given the authors of Labour’s soap opera look like writing “Our Andy” into the lead role in Coronation Street, we are entitled to ask which Andy Burnham has turned up on set.

The public ought to know, opposition parties want to know, and the media want to find out.

Burnham it seems is not so keen on the latter. That is his first mistake.

Twenty six and a half years ago the Labour Party made the same mistake at the opening of the Millenium Dome. Oh I know this Tory idea -project managed by New Labour was a famous white elephant, right? Well maybe, but part of that narrative that embedded with the public, was from a relentless negative review from the media from the start. Why? Because on a near freezing, drizzling New Years Eve 1999 the press were held for two hours outside before gaining entry.

Keep the media out, treating them mean, is a risky business.

Burnham has avoided their questions and whilst some privately supportive but publicly neutral old guard commentators have explained his Manchester speech would have been overshadowed with a Q&A:

Who will your Chancellor be? Does he feel sorry for Keir Starmer  having ousted him? Will he be calling an election, given he advocated for one when the Tories swapped PMs like intoxicated 10 year olds on an 80’s Noel Edmond’s kids show?

It makes internal Comms sense. Shut it down and manage the message you want. Fair enough, but first, like on Millenium Eve don’t make the lobby angry and second, they and the British people deserve to see their probable next PM subjected to rigorous questioning.

Indeed the increasingly frustrated Speaker should probably insist MPs get to grill him first, as Badenoch has suggested – perhaps he should do a pre-recess PMQs?

Because we are entitled to more than the carefully crafted cheeky chap with his dress down bonhomie but answers to politically serious questions about Britain’s future and his plans for shaping that.

Yes, he gave a speech which Oliver Dean drilled into yesterday but for me a lot of it sounded like a poor pastiche of Oasis and Beetles lyrics. Know what else has dark eyes and long lashes? The Walrus.

Interpretations of what exactly he was advocating have varied from an answer to the assumptions of the 80’s and Thatcherism the promise of council house building and the like to a geographic repositioning of the distribution of power in the UK.

Perhaps the most intriguing was the reaction from aides in Starmer’s-still number 10 that apart from hiving off part of the wheel house of U.K. power and moving it to Manchester, they are reported to have said “we were doing much of this already”

Here’s where the Tories come in, rightly nervous, whatever Kemi says about election readiness – and they aren’t – they have options here. Either it is just a differently told version of the same, which mark my words will not cut it, or it’s really different sounding but fails on the same central issue.

Burnham came across as a man with a plan built of slogans. Detail was thin and the costings, and money details non-existent. Like a major speech rich on words but pumped full of policy Monjarro. Enough big questions remain to make observers queasy.

That’s why not letting people, including the markets, know now who the Chancellor will be if Reeves is off matters. How he pays for this plan and who the Robbing to his Batman is going to be is a vital part of judging what is about to happen.

He’s had to swallow the thin gruel of the Defence Investment plan unveiled by a vanishing Prime Minister clutching at legacy life rafts which only escapes John Healey’s charge of being too little too late by two weeks and £1.5bn. There are big holes still that Burnham will have no choice but to fill, and explain how.

If he truly wants cross party consensus, he should accept the Conservative offer of votes to support welfare reform.

Then there’s the move to Manchester so our new leader can truly be the King in the North, but I doubt the actual King will ride forth for weekly meetings. If the Monarch won’t go the Mancunian, then the Mancunian must go to the Monarch, in London.

But the biggest issue of all is the motivation for this northern devolution revolution.

It’s about growth.

We are back via tackling child poverty, protection of women and girls, through Chagos, trade deals and national security to economic growth as the Government’s “number one priority”

So far nothing Burnham has said convinces he isn‘t either going to have to raise tax or borrow more. Or both. That’ll put ‘hope in your hearts’

He talked of creating economic growth via the apparatus of the state, albeit devolved to the local level.

The new order is to be an attractive environment for the private sector to be co-opted into. But that ignore the fundamental, that economic growth will only come from the private sector, flourishing not from nationalising, state controlling, largely  unaccountable metro mayors. And by the way the most successful metro mayors know this.

Manchester is pointed to as growing under Burnham’s reign there, but it’s far from certain that he can translate that across a nation.

A Labour MP was at pains to tell me that Burnham isn’t ultimately destined to be like the glossy progressive hope of Canada’s Justin, glitzily successful until becoming the unpopular steward of a bloated welfare state.

It’s true though.