Here we go again. Or rather, here our political leaders go again. As the reality of what Labour did to itself sinks in, the only people excited by the prospect of a change of leader, of prime minister, are Labour. If it is to be Andy Burnham, and he is the clear favourite — although with the caveat of that by-election to overcome — there will be an ecstatic response from his many supporters. The photogenic, boyish wonder, the prince outside Westminster, beyond Watford Gap, the King of the North — he will be coming to London and he will show us.
That is the rationale, that somehow Burnham brings a magic touch, injecting excitement and pizazz into a government that in two years has lost its way. The Sir Keir Starmer administration is marooned, holed, driven on to the rocks by torpor and a sheer inability to get things done. All that promise, which secured Starmer a landslide, lost in a swirling sea of scandal and uselessness. Starmer, we now realise, is ill-suited to No 10, he is not a commander, a doer, not even, as one captain of industry said to me this week, “a COO”. Ouch. Starmer, he said, would be a competent down table senior manager, “on the executive committee, but as the lawyer”.
