Andy Burnham: The Comfort-Zone Prime Minister Who’s Absolutely Nailing the Small Stuff While Britain Slowly Roasts
Andy Burnham is winning on cost-of-living, losing on climate, and coasting on Nigel Farage’s spectacular implosion. A portrait of a PM very much in his element - which is fine, unless you’re on fire.
Let us begin with a fact that should concern us all: it is 38 degrees Celsius in Wolverhampton. Wolverhampton. A city whose principal exports are Black Country stoicism and mild suspicion of outsiders is currently hotter than Barcelona. The tarmac is melting on the A449. A pensioner in Bilston has reportedly been using her bus pass to fan herself rather than catch a bus, on the entirely reasonable grounds that the bus is also on fire.
And in Downing Street, Prime Minister Andy Burnham is absolutely delighted to tell you that he has just frozen the energy price cap for a further quarter and introduced a new scheme to help low-income families with their weekly shop. Which is, to be fair, genuinely useful. It is also, one cannot help noticing, roughly as relevant to a country in the grip of an unprecedented summer heatwave as handing out woolly jumpers at the gates of Pompeii.
Welcome to the Burnham era. It is, so far, a masterclass in the politics of the achievable - relentlessly focused, impressively communicated, and operating at a temperature approximately forty degrees cooler than the national emergency unfolding outside the window.
The Small Wins Machine
To give credit where it is absolutely due: Burnham has been very, very good at the retail politics game. The man who spent years as Greater Manchester’s metro mayor mastering the art of the visible, tangible, photographable policy win has brought that entire playbook to Number Ten, and it is working. Freeze a bill here, cap a price there, announce a pilot scheme in a marginal constituency with a friendly local MP and a professionally grateful family standing nearby - rinse, repeat, watch the focus groups purr.
The communications operation is, frankly, extraordinary. Every policy announcement arrives pre-packaged with real people, real savings, real receipts. Last Tuesday, the government announced a new scheme capping the cost of children’s school uniforms. By Wednesday morning, every morning show in Britain had a relieved-looking mum from Swindon explaining that it would save her £47. By Thursday, Burnham was in a playground in Swindon wearing a slightly too-large high-visibility jacket and looking absolutely thrilled about it. The man knows the assignment.
The polls reflect it. Burnham sits at a comfortable lead - not a landslide, not a revolution, but a steady, reassuring cushion of approval from a public that, after years of political chaos, is deeply grateful for a government that appears to be broadly competent and only occasionally embarrassing. For now...
The Heatwave in the Room
Which brings us, inexorably, to the planet. It is, in case you had somehow missed it, absolutely cooking. The UK has now recorded its hottest June since records began, its second-hottest July, and August is shaping up to be less a summer month and more a sustained act of atmospheric aggression. Infrastructure is buckling. Hospitals are overwhelmed. The phrase “unprecedented heat event” has been used so many times by Met Office spokespeople that it has essentially lost all meaning, which is itself rather a profound statement about where we are.
Burnham’s response to all of this has been, to choose a word carefully, measured. There have been warm words, appropriately enough, about the climate transition. There has been a restatement of existing net zero commitments. There has been a working group. There is, apparently, a review. What there has conspicuously not been is anything resembling the urgent, this-is-a-crisis, we-are-changing-everything energy that the moment rather obviously demands.
Asked directly last week whether the heatwaves had changed his thinking on the pace of climate action, the Prime Minister said - and this is a direct quote - “We are absolutely committed to our ambitious climate targets and we will be setting out further details in due course.” In due course. Britain is a rotisserie. Due course.
Donald Trump, bless his slightly ailing cotton socks, keeps reminding us that Britain’s latest PM plans to “drill baby drill...” Presumably for oil.
The Farage Factor
Here, though, is where Burnham’s extraordinary luck comes into sharp focus. Because while a more ruthless opposition might be making considerable hay from a government that seems constitutionally incapable of treating a climate emergency as an emergency, the official opposition is currently far too busy imploding to bother.
Nigel Farage, the man who was, as recently as three months ago, being described in certain excitable right-wing publications as “the most dangerous man in British politics”, has spent the summer losing by-elections even when he wins them, watching his popularity melt like his excuses about dodgy funding, and giving interviews in which he appears to be arguing with himself about what his party actually stands for. It has been, by any measure, a catastrophic few weeks.
The by-election debacles in particular have been the gift that simply will not stop giving. Forced to battle with a council-approved bin, Farage managed to simultaneously win the election safely, and yet massively embarrass himself by proving that a fifth of his constituency was more than happy to replace him with a fake space alien (that bin again). Farage himself has responded to this in the manner of a man who has been told his restaurant has received a one-star review and has chosen to blame the customers. The polling tells the same story: Reform is falling, Burnham is rising, and the Prime Minister is reaping the considerable political reward of simply not being Nigel Farage.
The Honeymoon’s Golden Glow
It is, in short, a honeymoon - and a rather spectacular one at that. Burnham is popular, his opponents are a shambles, and the government’s small-wins communications machine hums along producing a daily output of reassuring, useful, voter-friendly policy that keeps the news cycle full and the focus groups happy.
The question, the only question, really, is whether the comfort zone becomes the destination rather than the starting point. A PM who is brilliant at freezing the energy price cap is genuinely valuable. A PM who responds to a country that is structurally, visibly, measurably overheating with a working group and a promise to set out further details in due course is something rather less than the moment requires.
Britain, right now, needs both the woolly jumper and the fire extinguisher. Andy Burnham is very, very good at woolly jumpers. The question of whether he can find the extinguisher, and whether he will bother looking while the polls are this good, may well define not just his premiership, but the summer that follows this one, and the one after that.
In Wolverhampton, meanwhile, it is now 39 degrees. The bus pass lady has given up entirely and gone inside. One cannot blame her. Due course, apparently, has not yet arrived.
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