Good morning, and let’s abandon all conditional tenses because finally Andy Burnham is UK prime minister and, on a day of ceremony and celebration, he pledged his government would be “a circuit breaker for Britain”.
A defining characteristic of Team Burnham thus far has been the concentrated silence at its heart – a vacuum filled by increasingly frenzied speculation in recent days about his cabinet picks and policy priorities. As the black box finally cracked open on Monday, with his first instruction as prime minister – to end rough sleeping – and his surprise choice of chancellor, I was at the Guardian’s head office in London, speaking to editors and correspondents covering the early hours of Burnham’s premiership about what they might reveal for the country.
