Good morning. This week, we anticipate the arrival of Britain’s seventh prime minister in the space of a decade. Barring a sequence of events too freakish to contemplate this early in the day, Andy Burnham will be declared Labour leader on Friday and invited to form a new government thereafter.
Sceptical as I am about doomy predictions on Britain’s chronic ungovernability, I wanted to speak to somebody who could offer some deeper context. Step forward Guardian columnist Andy Beckett, who also writes vivid modern histories about the country’s defining political ideas, and step forward you – First Edition readers – who responded when I asked what contemporary liabilities we should be talking about.
