You’ve got to hand it to Andy Burnham. He left nothing out on the pitch. It would have been so easy to play it safe. To deliver a traditional leader’s speech to a home crowd. One we’ve been seeing from leaders of all parties for more than 15 years. Something warm, a feelgood vibes word salad with the odd minor spending announcement thrown in. Hell, the Labour conference would have probably settled for it. They already had all the hope that they had come for. The hope that they were back in with a fighting chance of winning the next election. They wouldn’t have even dared think that three months ago.
But Andy did it differently. Just as he had promised. He had said he was a different kind of politician and he duly made good on that. Hope came with honesty, he said. And honesty was what we got. Nothing was redacted. No coded hints. Come the end of his hour-long speech, no one could be in any doubt about what he thought. More than that, what he believed.
