‘When you think that you’ve lost everything’, sang Bob Dylan, ‘you find out that you can always lose a little more.’

Ahead of Andy Burnham announcing his new cabinet, the widely held view among right-thinking people was that nothing was more important than Ed Miliband losing his job at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. Surely no one could be worse than this fanatic? Miliband not only lost his job but will now spend much of his time abroad in his new role as UK foreign secretary. Happy days. Alas, those who couldn’t think of anyone worse to be in charge of the nation’s energy supply had forgotten about Miatta Fahnbulleh, former chief executive of the New Economics Foundation and Britain’s new Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero, with the emphasis heavily on ‘Net Zero’.

Fahnbulleh has accused Zack Polanski of stealing her vision of a green economic revolution and she has a point. The economically illiterate, tree-hugging, anti-growth agenda that the New Economics Foundation (NEF) has been pushing for the past 40 years is indistinguishable from that of the current Green Party. Indeed, the NEF sprang out of what was then known as the Ecology Party in the 1980s. For years, it provided a little light relief in the think-tank world, with its happy-clappy focus on ‘wellbeing’ over wealth and its hare-brained policy proposals, such as setting up its own rival to Uber and creating local currencies like the Brixton Pound.

According to the NEF’s Happy Planet Index 2012, Rwanda was a better place to live than Luxembourg, and Costa Rica was the greatest country in the world. How we laughed! The think-tank’s obsession with climate change seemed to be motivated by a perverse desire for the sacrifices it assumed would have to be made. Privation was a feature rather than a bug of its efforts to save the planet. In 2009, it dished out carbon ration books, which limited people to a certain number of showers, baths and toilet flushes per week to get them ready for the future. In 2010, it followed up its book, Growth Isn’t Working, with the sequel, Growth Isn’t Possible. In the same year, it called for a 21-hour working week to help tackle unemployment and ‘over-consumption’ and to ‘help to engineer a “steady-state” economy’.

As the 2010s wore on and the public began to see what an economy without growth actually looked like, the NEF quietly pivoted away from wanting a ‘steady-state economy’. By 2020, it was complaining that the UK’s GDP per capita was slightly lower than it had been in 2008 (for which the NEF blamed the government’s failure to ‘invest in insulation and renewables’), but it never lost its fondness for terrible policies. Rent controls? Yes please! A wealth tax? You bet! Price caps? Of course! No wonder Fahnbulleh thinks Polanski has stolen her ideas. (Having your ideas stolen by politicians is kind of the point of think-tanks, by the way.)

The NEF worldview is driven by a way of thinking that is not so much ‘new economics’ as anti-economics. Its belief that a 21-hour working week will reduce unemployment shows that it has fallen for the lump of labour fallacy – the false notion that there is a fixed, finite amount of work available in an economy. Its idea of replacing fiscal rules with ‘fiscal referees’ appointed by the government – who, the NEF assumes, will give governments greater latitude for borrowing – ignores the fact that the bond markets do a ruthlessly efficient job of refereeing already. The Bristol Pound and similar local currencies rest on the foolish belief that places get rich by not trading with outsiders.

Immerse yourself in the world of the New Economics Foundation and you will be transported to a parallel universe in which Britain is a night-watchman state practising ‘trickle-down economics’, ruthlessly cutting benefits and doing sod all about the ‘climate crisis’. Despite public spending rising from 40 per cent to 46 per cent of GDP and the national debt trebling since 2007, the NEF has consistently maintained that Britain is labouring under ‘austerity’. Despite income inequality falling to the lowest level in 30 years, the NEF’s current chief executive, Danny Sriskandarajah, insists that this is ‘a time of rising inequality’ and that we are ‘living through an inequality crisis’.

This is the organisation that Miatta Fahnbulleh ran between 2017 and 2023, when it dropped the silly but endearing hippy stuff and became a run-of-the-mill left-wing think-tank. Now she is at the heart of government and her latest successor has congratulated Andy Burnham for ‘calling time on trickle-down economics’ and for going ‘beyond aggregate growth’.

As for Net Zero, there can be no doubt that Fahnbulleh is at least as zealous as her old boss, Ed Miliband. In an article written in 2019, in which she claims that British governments on the left and right have ‘spent decades following a neoliberal recipe of tax cuts, reduced social welfare benefits, and deregulation’, she called for Net Zero to be achieved ‘within 10 to 15 years’, which would be ruinously expensive if it were not utterly impossible. She is a staunch supporter of the Green New Deal, which the NEF helped devise back in 2008. She has applauded Extinction Rebellion and used to be the chair of the Croydon Climate Crisis Commission. If she’s using the issue of climate change to climb the greasy pole, she has been playing a very long game.

Instead, there is every indication that Fahnbulleh is a true believer, a dyed-in-the-wool climate ideologue with delusional economic beliefs for whom no cost is too great for the prize of decarbonising the United Kingdom. She genuinely believes that energy costs are too high because we are over-reliant on fossil fuels and wants to make a ‘big sprint’ towards a Net Zero electricity grid by 2030.

Don’t assume that things cannot get worse. Things can always get worse.

Christopher Snowdon is director of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs and the co-host of Last Orders, spiked’s nanny-state podcast.

Andy Burnham has pledged to do politics differently. He certainly wants to change the look of politics, if not necessarily the substance. In his inaugural speech yesterday, out went the official lectern. So too, it seems, will the protocol of formal dress normally associated with high office. Burnham let it be known last week that he intends to wear a suit and tie only in the House of Commons.

So, we face the grim prospect of the UK prime minister conducting affairs of state in ‘figure-hugging’ black t-shirts, jogging bottoms and expensive trainers, as though permanently recovering from a rave in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. The tieless days of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell may soon come to look positively Edwardian. Whether nose piercings and neck tattoos make an appearance in cabinet meetings remains to be seen.

Does any of this really matter? Isn’t attachment to the suited-and-booted look merely a fogeyish affectation, the last refuge of people who still iron their handkerchiefs?

Not really. Clothes are never just clothes. They are statements of intent. They tell us how an institution sees itself and how seriously it expects to be taken. Burnham’s determination to import work-from-home aesthetics into the highest offices of state is a strangely adolescent gesture. The office becomes an extension of the sofa. Government becomes just another Microsoft Teams meeting.

For centuries, the workplace has deliberately distinguished itself from the home. The transition from private to public life was symbolised by changing how one dressed. We still understand this instinctively. We put schoolchildren into uniforms not because wearing blazers improves their maths skills, but because uniform marks the transition from the private world of the family into the public world of shared rules, responsibilities and expectations. Dressing differently encourages behaving differently.

That principle once applied even more strongly to high office. Putting on the suit, the gown or the uniform was never simply about appearances. It was a ritual acknowledgement that the office mattered more than the individual occupying it. Ministers were expected to adapt themselves to the institution rather than expecting the institution to adapt to their personal brand.

Burnham’s declaration implies the opposite. The message is that public office should accommodate the lifestyle preferences of those who hold it. It reflects the broader cultural assumption that institutions should become more ‘authentic’, more casual and more like us, rather than expecting us to rise to their standards. It is a curious inversion. The prime minister is no longer expected to look like the prime minister – instead, he is expected to look like everybody else.

Dress codes have always signalled seriousness. Judges still wear robes. Military officers still wear uniforms. Diplomats still dress with painstaking formality because clothes communicate respect – for the occasion, for the office and for those with whom they are dealing.

Nobody imagines that a well-cut suit makes someone more competent. But it does say that the occasion deserves more than whatever happened to be hanging over the back of the chair. Winston Churchill famously wore his informal ‘siren suit’ during the Blitz without diminishing his authority. But Churchill understood that this exceptional clothing reflected exceptional circumstances.

Dress also marked the divide between the old Britain of duty and the new Britain of perpetual youthfulness. Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell understood perfectly well that loosening the tie was never just about comfort. It symbolised a broader rejection of the formality and restraint of the pre-New Labour world. Politics would become more informal, more conversational, more relaxed – and, inevitably, more personal.

Since then, every institution has been encouraged to ‘dress down’, flatten hierarchies and blur distinctions. Universities resemble tech start-ups. Bank managers look like marketing executives. Senior civil servants often dress like they are on their way to Glastonbury. The assumption is always that informality breeds creativity, even though it more often breeds familiarity and lowered expectations.

There is, after all, a reason why nobody wants to see airline pilots flying in hoodies or surgeons operating in cargo shorts. Uniforms and conventions reassure us because they communicate professionalism before a word has been spoken. We instinctively associate standards of appearance with standards of conduct, even if we know intellectually that the relationship is imperfect.

None of this means politicians need to resemble Victorian undertakers or City solicitors. But symbols matter because politics itself runs on symbols. Ceremonies, traditions, robes, despatch boxes, Black Rod and yes, even suits and ties, all remind us that democratic government is larger than the personalities temporarily passing through it.

Andy Burnham’s wardrobe may seem a trivial matter. Yet it reflects a deeper instinct of contemporary politics. The irony is that, in trying so hard to look ordinary, politicians risk making the extraordinary responsibilities of government appear ordinary, too.

Keir Starmer proved that a suit and tie are no guarantee of good government. But it is difficult to believe Britain will be better governed by a prime minister who looks as though he’s just nipped out of PureGym.

Neil Davenport is a writer based in London.

Andy Burnham was born in January 1970, in the Liverpool suburb of Aintree (famed for its racecourse and its iron). His dad was a telephone engineer, his mother a GP’s receptionist. It is my regrettable but inevitable duty to have to inform you that he joined the Labour Party when he was 15 years old. He has a Roman Catholic background, but then this shouldn’t really surprise us, as so much of progressivism is homily and responses – it requires no thought at all.

A lot has been written about Burnham lately, and he has certainly talked at great length, but very little information has been imparted. He is like a book that you’ve forgotten you’ve read. You recall the cover, the sensation of turning the pages, but nothing about the story.

As you will know, the new UK PM appears to be a very ordinary man, and in fact almost painfully well-adjusted in his demeanour. Ordinariness should be a virtue in a prime minister, particularly after the run of freaks and geeks we’ve had over the past decade. But it is not. And actually, he is stranger than we think – not in himself, no, but in the aura he creates and its curious effect on others. He is a very weak flavour of a man, which makes his elevation to saviour by Labour MPs all the more depressingly baffling. It’s like being tied up awaiting a terrible fate when the door bursts open and you cry, ‘Thank heavens, it’s Superman!’, when in fact it’s the bassist from the Inspiral Carpets. Labour MPs seem to rate his modestly impressive achievements as mayor of Manchester rather higher than they deserve.

When Keir Starmer came to power, even though I was certain it would mean disaster and would end pretty much the way that it has (though sooner than I anticipated), I kept schtum. I couldn’t help doubting myself. Maybe I’ve judged this wrong, I thought. Remember, at the dawn of Starmer, all those articles by folk supposedly in the know about those ruthlessly efficient, pragmatic political masterminds Morgan McSweeney and Sue Gray?

Reading those, I pondered that perhaps I’d overlooked something. And it would be a mistake to underestimate the intelligence and acumen of your political opponents, wouldn’t it? But this fair-mindedness has now become far harder to sustain. It is very difficult to compose a thought along the lines of ‘Perhaps the mighty brains of Lucy Powell and Chris Bryant know something I don’t?’. I find that there are limits of Pollyanna-ishness which I cannot cross.

This time round, I feel so confident in my prediction that I’m going to put it on paper. Here it is: Andy Burnham will be a disaster. He cannot succeed because he is totally out of step with reality. Even with the most favourable prevailing political conditions, he would fail. And the prevailing conditions are awful.

Andy Burnham as the answer to Britain’s problems? He is comically unequal to the task. The solutions he is unveiling as I write – there should be more mayors, we must have a second No10 in Levenshulme, there’s been too much Thatcherism! – are risibly out of touch. It is like somebody presenting at an emergency room, projecting blood and vomit from every orifice, and being sent away with a couple of Nurofen.

But before we get on to that Burnham policy agenda, let’s examine the tone of its delivery. Apparently, the feeling in Labour is that Starmer was far too doomy and gloomy at the kick-off back in 2024, what with Rachel Reeves circling overhead cawing like a constipated crow. So, in the time-honoured political tradition of overcompensating for a predecessor, Andy is going to be breezy, bright and light.

He has a low bar to clear – to be less annoying than Keir Starmer. Unfortunately, Andy is just as annoying, but in a different way. Starmer makes one want to vomit. The Burnham aesthetic brings on more of a dry heave. He is reminiscent of Chorlton from Chorlton and the Wheelies, but without Chorlton’s innocence. Worse, he has obviously started to believe in his own myth, peacocking and preening and taking everybody and everything for granted.

We’ve had much evidence of self-adoration in the three weeks of his run-up. Excruciating social-media content has abounded. Scrutiny from journalists, even friendly ones, would be far too much of a downer. Instead, Andy has popped up on Reddit for an ‘Ask Me Anything’, in which he answered only the questions he liked the sound of. He ran away from journos after his one public speech of this little interval, but agreed to be grilled by… Gary Lineker. And he chatted on the street to the people of Cardiff, the poor sods. Haven’t they suffered enough? He described this stunt as evidence of him ‘doing politics differently’, as if speaking to members of the public was a spiffing new idea nobody had ever previously considered. I suspect that people don’t care how politics is done, as long as it is done competently. This obsession with tone is a sure sign that there is no actual content.

When the accusation of not being ‘serious’ is made against politicians, I flinch a bit. Neither seriousness nor its lack intrinsically counts for very much. If the person concerned has an easy, affable manner or if they are a crabby, snappy downer, what does it matter? The only important consideration is that they perform effectively and display good judgement. Starmer, like Boris, Truss and Rishi, was dumped not because of his demeanour – though obviously it didn’t help – but because he kept making really bad decisions. The public is remarkably tolerant of weird and unpleasant politicians who govern wisely, though it’s been a long time since that was tested. The current Andy vibes – big head swelling, big mouth running on – are inappropriate, yes. But they wouldn’t be a problem if his worldview were closer to reality.

Which brings us back to Andy’s policy platform, such as we know it. Burnham refuses to acknowledge that anything has happened since about October 1990 (the height of Madchester, appropriately). He is still 20 years old, still the bright northern lad at Cambridge with hair horns and the coolest girlfriend, and the Beautiful South are still at No1 with ‘A Little Time’. John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the long list of subsequent nits – no, didn’t happen.

Britain in 1990 is a world that many would wish to return to. But you have to face reality to deal with reality. ‘Britain took a series of wrong turns in the 1980s’, says Andy, 36 years later, as if the Eighties were a few months ago. While I am all for long-term thinking, this is fascinatingly nonsensical. And why stop there? Down with Stafford Cripps! Kick out Bonar Law! It is bizarre, this throwing back of our current malaise to the most recent period that we were governed remotely competently.

It takes blinkers of a most peculiar kind to look at Britain in 2026 – benefits bill bringing us to the verge of bankruptcy; mass immigration, both legal and illegal, destroying the social framework of centuries; staggering rates of taxation choking any hope of economic recovery – and conclude that the problem is Margaret Thatcher. But she remains the indivisible, indigestible block in the guts of the ageing British progressive. They can’t let Maggie go. Things are bad? It must be because of Thatcher, not the subsequent 36 years of progressive rule. In fact, in what passes for Burnham’s mind, the problem must be that her successors were not progressive enough. So he has to correct that.

This is quite frighteningly infantile when you stop to think about it. Burnham is running an ancient mental model that simply cannot be updated by new facts – Windows 3.0 in the age of Windows 11. I told you he is stranger than he seems. His amiable envelope disguises this madness. He may be strikingly inane in his tone, but he is strikingly insane in his thinking.

He has kept details of his actual plans very vague. What do we know? Apparently, he intends to take the political fight to Reform UK head on – with policies such as increasing immigration by admitting the Boriswave at terrifying cost, genuflecting to Hamas and immiserating the final remaining pockets of wealth that are keeping the entire show just barely on the road. He seems to desire the return of British Leyland, which will somehow empower the working class.

And this wonky Weltanschauung is why he cannot succeed. His in-tray is heavy with 2026 problems, and he has a 1990 mind (maybe even a 1978 mind). The first horrible exogenous atrocity of his premiership – and there will be many, things being as they are – will confront him with contemporary reality, but he will be unable to process it.

In fact, the happy-chappy banter already clashes in a very ugly way against the substance, such as it is. ‘We got that wrong’, he mumbled earlier this month, in his apology to Hamas and their British-born proxies.

And who has he assembled as his team? Louise Haigh, a convicted fraudster as the first secretary of state – but this doesn’t seem to matter somehow. Loopy Net Zero fanatic Miatta Fahnbulleh as energy secretary. His director of political strategy is Matthew McGregor – a name which sounds like a spoof version of Morgan McSweeney. Maybe he can be followed by Michael McClaren or Mitchell McFarlane? McGregor is a disastrous quango progressive, all up for the repatriation of ISIS brides and a former head honcho of sinister outfits 38 Degrees and the egregiously misnamed Hope Not Hate.

Burnham is laughably unqualified for the job of prime minister, a job he has been wafted into not by the public but at the urgent demand of the tragic one-term Weebles on the Labour backbenches. His arrival in Westminster has been incredible to behold. Andy Burnham, the also-ran non-entity who falls apart at the suggestion of a difficult question, whose only mark in government in the New Labour era was the MRSA scandal… this is Labour’s messiah?

It can only end in disaster, because neither he nor they can face the reality of what they have done to Britain. They are living in a false paradise. In the words of Charlene in the spoken section of her 1982 No1 smash, ‘I’ve Never Been To Me’:

‘Hey! You know what paradise is? It’s a lie. A fantasy we create about people and places as we’d like them to be.’

Of course, Andy Burnham is not the answer to Britain’s decline. That would take superhuman powers of forbearance and a revival of Victorian-era levels of dedication and enterprise. It also requires honesty and judgement – two interlocking qualities that this trivial twit does not possess and cannot hope to provide. The best we can hope for is that the Burnham era is the final stop of the cognitive dissonance roadshow. That it’s the last splutter of progressivism – and the terminal stage of the final Labour government.

Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter, author and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who. This is an edited extract from his ‘Working Class Zeroes’ series on Substack.