Burnham The Midnight Oil

(Read on, or view here: https://youtu.be/DfQvq0ANIiA)

Our incoming Prime Minister’s got a lot on his plate. Even more than he bargained for, thanks to the gristly leftovers scraped onto it from the outgoing guy’s not very tasty treat. Andy Burnham’s got to gulp it all down somehow, but it’ll take all his fabled communication skills to avoid leaving a nasty taste in everyone else’s mouth.

‘I’m afraid there’s no money.’ That scrawled note left by a Labour Treasury minister for the Tory who was taking over back in 2010 was meant as a good-natured if rueful joke. It misfired when the words were rather spitefully made public.

But it’s nothing next to the one Keir Starmer’s already screamed from the rooftops. The account’s not just empty, it’s in the red to the tune of up to fifteen billion smackers.

That’s how much is to be shelled out, pardon pun, to the Ministry of Defence towards a horribly overdue catch-up thanks to the Russian bear baring its teeth.

The happy era of perestroika and glasnost ushered in by President Gorbachev back in Margaret Thatcher’s day are now a distant memory, along with the peace dividend that allowed our armed forces to be hollowed out.

Now that the money diverted to much nicer things, like health and welfare, has got to be clawed back it would have been nice of Starmer to allocate exactly where from. And so own the problem.

Fat chance. Could be he feels hard done by and reckons Burnham deserves a good kicking for being such a beast.

Whatever the reasoning, it will fall to the new man to figure out what bits to slice off. New hospitals? Road improvements? Transport projects?

Wherever the axe lands it’s going to hurt our new PM’s cool dude cred. Ultimately therefore it won’t enhance Labour’s chances at the next election.

If Starmer had thought this through he might have spotted that. But it would have involved political savvy, which almost everyone agrees is something he so doesn’t have.

It gets worse. His former Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney has finally admitted that in the run-up to the last election the focus was entirely on winning it, not on what to do next.

Then, when it turned out to be a landslide victory, he’s confessed, Labour was simply not ready for government.

At least the soon-to-be-off regime has had the good sense to let pubs stay open for the upcoming England/Mexico match in the middle of the night. But they even kicked that ball around before realising it was a no-brainer.

All such a contrast to the brimful bag of goodies that Burnham’s got lined up to dazzle us with. Whether they’ll do what they’re cracked up to remains to be seen. But you can’t say he hasn’t got them.

Given the manic pace the news cycle’s screeching ahead in, it’s easy to forget that just a few days back he set out his pitch for a new way of governing Britain.

The speech was big on driving power away from Whitehall and into the regions. Our until recently King of the North plans to spend a fair few waking hours up there to make sure it does actually happen.

How feasible that will be remains to be seen. But he could recruit a serious big hitter as Foreign Secretary to do the world stage stuff that Starmer always took on himself. That should free quite a lot of his time for a start.

There’ve even been murmurings that he could offer the job to one-time Labour leadership contender David Miliband.

Fun to see how that’d land, given that younger brother Ed, who pipped him to that particular post, is tipped to be the next Chancellor. Sibling rivalry? And the rest in their case.

We’ll know all in a couple of weeks or so, when – and it is all but certain – Burnham picks up the keys to Number Ten.

For now though, there’s plenty more to pick over from that big speech of his a few days back.

However he does manage to sort the defence dilemma he does have in mind tarting up transport links. And building loads more council houses. And getting young people off the dole and into work. And taking control of vital services.

As to-do lists go, he freely concedes it’s a biggie. But so worth aiming for. ‘Imagine,’ he said, ‘good growth in every postcode, and hope in every heart.’

Goes without saying that right wing newspapers pooh-poohed the lot. But more objective commentators didn’t.

Former Tory leader William Hague was quite open about it. ‘To have a Number Ten North as the nerve centre of a rewired Britain’ he wrote in The Times, ‘is an arresting ambition.

‘Moving more government functions out of London’ he added, ‘is the right idea.’

As for those who actively want to give Burnham a fair wind, notably backbench Labour MPs, they were over the moon that they’d at last have a leader who could actually make a speech with a bit of oomph.

OK, he was only giving outlines, but you couldn’t miss what he was on about. And in case anyone wasn’t too clear he’s also held an ‘ask me anything’ session on the social media forum Reddit.

Within an hour the question tally was topping a thousand, with people after his take on everything from oldies’ pensions to legalising dope. God knows when he’ll find time to answer them, but he is at least trying to connect.

Reform leader Nigel Farage, meanwhile, seems to be feeling the need to keep a much lower than normal profile.

Not just because of the parliamentary sleaze watchdog looking into a five-million-pound wedge passed his way by a billionaire chum. The revelation that he and his partner have five very expensive homes has also raised eyebrows.

None of which does a lot for his ordinary bloke man-of-the-people image.

This just as Labour’s showing signs of a Burnham bounce. It’s ridiculously early days, but the latest YouGov poll does show a two-point uptick in the red corner, while Farage’s turquoise tribe is down one, and the Greens are also missing out.

Of course colour coding can be ever so confusing. For humans, and indeed for cats. Especially one named Wilbur, who was naughty enough to gatecrash a gender reveal party near Penzance in Cornwall last week.

For anyone not up to speed on the term, these are gatherings held when an expectant mum reveals to family and friends what sex the little one’s going to be. Usually with the aid of powder or confetti or some such.

Probably safe to assume that in this case there’s a boy on the way, judging by the fact that Wilbur came home not sporting her usual dark-striped and white furry ensemble, or pink, but a great deal of rather distinctive blue.

To add to the delight of the occasion, her owner, Sophie Jenkin, had originally given her a boy name because, well, it can be quite hard to tell with cats.

Anyway, because she definitely is a girl, she was probably as pleased as Sophie after a good bath cleared up any possible misunderstanding.