Burnham’s How To Fail episode teaches us all a lesson

“What? Not again. They told you twice they don’t want you. Why are you doing it again?” is how Van Heel reacted when Burnham told her he wanted to give Westminster another go. Again: she and I stood on similar ground. Granted, she is Andy Burnham’s wife, meaning that her words probably carried more weight than my own, but our assessments were the same.

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If anything, she’d been even ruder than me. When Burnham first considered standing in Makerfield, her response was, he told the Sunday Times afterwards, “probably a two-word answer”.

Still, here we are now. Last week, the MP for Makerfield sat down with Elizabeth Day to record her How To Fail podcast, and he told her about how tough it’d been to convince his wife that he was ready to try again. The show was recorded in No 10 North, one of his flashiest early achievements as prime minister. Andy: 1 – the Maries: 0.

That he even agreed to be interviewed by Day was striking; politicians rarely like to focus on their mistakes. Burnham just can’t escape his own, though – for a long time, he was the poster boy for failure. He stood for his party’s leadership in 2010 and lost, and he stood for his party’s leadership in 2015 and he lost again. Somehow, by the end of that run, he’d become a bit of a joke in Labour; their perennial, needy bridesmaid.

It’s something he acknowledged quite freely to Day. “I became a much better politician in the end for not getting the position at that time because I probably hadn’t really thought things through enough”, he told her. 

“The Westminster world puts you on a certain track and makes you think a certain way”. Having to leave that world for a while, even if he did so with his tail between his legs, “really strengthened me as a politician”.

Though his premiership is still fresh, it seems hard to disagree with this assessment. I expected Burnham to be no better than his predecessor, and even committed my beliefs to print in The New World. I worried that he would sink the moment he got in the water, and would fail to even make a dent in Downing Street. So far, it seems that I was wrong.

Well, partly. My argument back then was that the Burnham I’d witnessed in Parliament simply wasn’t up to the job of prime minister. This is something I still stand by. What I got wrong, however, was the assumption that this was the politician we would be welcoming back into Westminster. 

As far as anyone can tell, the new incumbent at No 10 has genuinely changed and matured, and learnt from his past missteps. It may well be that his personal faults will damn him in the end, but we can cross that bridge when we get to it. In the meantime, it seems worth wondering if Burnham’s phoenix-like rise could teach us something broader about contemporary British politics.

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Much ink has been spilled poring over Keir Starmer’s defects, but one underrated problem may well have been that he’d simply not been in politics for long enough. No-one should seamlessly rise from new MP to prime minister in under a decade. It’s a lesson Rishi Sunak had to learn the hard way as well, and one we should now keep in mind.

A good PM must be resilient and able to get back on their feet quickly, no matter what happened to them. They need to be able to learn from their mistakes and keep growing and changing in order to face whatever challenges are thrown at them. These are skills you can only learn by failing – by fucking it up, making a mess and embarrassing yourself, then carrying on regardless. 

We – and I count myself in this – have become too quick to dismiss politicians the moment they stumble. Our collective impatience is understandable, as Britain’s problems feel so direly urgent, but it can – ironically – only lead to more failure.

As it turns out, what we needed to succeed all along might well have been a massive loser.