The hidden dangers that could wreck Andy Burnham: The Movie

And then, after several failed attempts witnessed in the first act, he returned to Westminster triumphant. The End.

The difficulty for Burnham, and for the rest of us, is that we all have to live through the post-credit scenes. Burnham has almost certainly done enough to be the next prime minister by next month. The bad news is that means he now actually has to do the job.

When the prime minister changes outside of a general election, there is an element of the surreal to it. Everything is different, but everything is the same, too. 

Burnham will have the same backbenchers as Keir Starmer did. He will be choosing his Cabinet from the same cast of characters. The advisors behind the scenes will be shuffled around (and some of them shuffled out entirely), but there will largely be the same core cast as before.

There is every chance that Burnham can manage the parliamentary party better than Keir Starmer did – gladhanding MPs was one of Starmer’s notable weak points – but warmer relations only gets you so far. Selling welfare reform or other tough choices to an already fractious party, with at most three years until an election, will always be a difficult task.

Burnham similarly inherits other constraints that bound Starmer’s administration. The “bond markets” are often talked about as if they are a force of nature, or else a shadowy cabal waiting to deliver a thumbs up or thumbs down on a government. 

The reality is more prosaic: the UK government needs to borrow money from overseas to function. To do that, people have to be willing to lend it, ideally as cheaply as possible. If they’re not willing to do so, debt gets more expensive – meaning cuts have to be found elsewhere to avoid a disastrous spiral. 

The UK government already has a lot of debt, and even under existing plans will have to borrow more money. Burnham is no more able to avoid that than any of his predecessors – and given Rachel Reeves changed the fiscal rules to spend more money once already, there is only so much a new prime minister can do on this front, too. The prospects of a free lunch look slim.

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All of these constraints would be difficult enough for a new prime minister to reckon with, but Burnham has spent much of the last few months adding more of his own to the pile. He has promised that he will abide by Labour’s restrictive manifesto promises on tax, ruling out increases in income tax, national insurance, and VAT – the three biggest revenue raisers. He has promised to keep the triple lock on pensions, and promised to keep to Rachel Reeves’ three fiscal rules (even if he refused to list them during a TV interview). 

During the Makerfield campaign, Burnham made lots of favourable noises – though falling short of promises – on more spending in all sorts of areas. Given the promises he’s made on taxes and spending already, he could find those extremely difficult to deliver, especially because Starmer’s existing spending plans for the next few years are extremely tight indeed. Does Burnham really want to go into the next election with spending freezes or cuts in most government departments?

If your belief is that Starmer’s government has actually been doing a brilliant job, but that Starmer lacked the skill set to sell that to the public, all of this might be absolutely fine – Burnham is more charismatic, more polished, and better at messaging. He can come in, repackage what’s there, and hope the polls go up.

Most people, though, think the government’s issues run deeper, and that is shaping up to be a much more difficult set of problems for whoever is occupying Downing Street. Burnham has never really been a details or policy guy, and he doesn’t like to get down in the weeds. 

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That can work for a prime minister, but he will need to be able to articulate what is different and how that will turn into concrete results. If the people are the same, and the broad tax and spend policy is the same, that leaves very little room for manoeuvre. However difficult getting to No 10 was for Burnham, the hard work starts now.

There is a saying that is often misattributed to Albert Einstein, who never said it: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. The actual roots of the saying are more interesting than the imagined one: its origins trace to Alcoholics Anonymous and the 20th-century addiction recovery movement in the USA.

The mantra was one to help encourage addicts in recovery to break their damaging patterns, and to understand that nothing would get better for them unless it did. If Labour wants a recovery of its own under Andy Burnham, it may need to learn that same lesson.