If he were alive today, Machiavelli would have enjoyed watching the first days of Andy Burnham’s premiership. An enemy of the Medicis, the Florentine diplomat (full name Niccolo di Bernardo dei Machiavelli) was a student of power. He would have appreciated the clarity, focus and – yes – the brutality of Burnham’s move against loyalists of former prime minister Keir Starmer.
This was not a purge comparable to Harold Macmillan’s “night of the long knives” in the 1950s. Back then, Macmillan sacked one third of his entire cabinet. But it does compare to Boris Johnson’s 2020 reshuffle when Sajid Javid was forced to resign as chancellor and other ministers were sacked as political power consolidated around Johnson’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings.
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