Ghosts of Downing Street’s past may have advice for Andy Burnham | Jonathan Freedland

TThe first piece of unsolicited advice I would give to the new British Prime Minister would be this: don’t take unsolicited advice. Don’t be one of those leaders who lets themselves be influenced by the last person in their ear. That’s what people said about Boris Johnson, that he was a cushion that bore the imprint of the last person who sat on it. Instead, Andy Burnham should take a close look at the experience of Johnson and the rest of his recent predecessors – and, let’s face it, there are plenty of them.

He might start by thinking about the period that will begin when he enters Downing Street on Monday. How he handles this first phase of his mandate is crucial: you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and all that. For many voters outside Greater Manchester, Burnham is still a relatively unknown quantity. Their opinion of him will be largely shaped by what he says and does over the coming weeks. For a large portion of the electorate, it will be the opening that decides their verdict on the show.

The obvious precedent is the most immediate. Keir Starmer ruined his own honeymoon by promising that things would only get worse. The gloom that set in during the summer of 2024 has never really changed. Certainly, Burnham arrives without the magic of another mandate won in a general election, but voters seem ready to give him a chance. It is recognized that seven prime ministers in 10 years is unsustainable and that, in the interests of the country, Burnham must succeed. This translates into goodwill that should not be wasted.

This is not quite the same thing as optimism, which, after the last decade, is in short supply. Perhaps it’s closer to hope. Either way, Burnham has to feed him, staying true to what he said, in a way today’s speech officially assuming leadership of the Labor Partythis was its defining mission: “Bring back hope”. It helps that he has an easier, sunnier attitude than the man he follows, but he needs to learn from Starmer’s first mistake. If there are sober warnings to be made regarding, for example, the economic outlook, he should defer to his chancellor. For now, the Prime Minister must convince the population that the future can be better.

If it works and Labor’s poll numbers improve, Burnham will have to avoid what proved a fateful mistake for one of his former bosses. There can be no question of early elections, not even a whisper. As Gordon Brown learned the hard way, such speculation quickly develops its own momentum, until the decision is effectively made for you: you must go to a snap poll, because to do otherwise seems to have been bottled. The only time you can discuss an election date is about an hour before you announce it.

Burnham insisted today that it was not yet done which will be one of his most important decisions: the composition of his cabinet and his team at Downing Street. One of the maxims of the Ronald Reagan administration was that “Personnel is policy” and it’s true. Burnham cannot do all the tasks himself, so who he appoints to key positions will determine the competence and ideological direction of his government. Starmer’s first chief of staff, Sue Gray, was in the role for only three months., replaced by the very different Morgan McSweeney, was an early warning of the uncertainty at the heart of his administration.

In the same vein, Burnham must be sure of his first moves. His aides say there will be a flurry of policy announcements next week and that’s a good thing: there can be no repeat of those Farage summers, when Labor’s inactivity allowed Britain’s Reform leader to dominate the media agenda. But these announcements must be the right ones. Burnham will need no reminder of the lasting damage caused by the 2024 decision to reduce the winter fuel allocation, subject to one of several possible reversals. The public’s patience with political U-turns is exhausted, exhausted by Starmer and Rachel Reeves. The new team will have to get it right the first time.

It’s easier if a PM has a clear action plan. Tacitly opposing the outgoing prime minister, Burnham was adamant today: “I know what I believe… I know what I want to do… I have a plan.” This is essential for several reasons, but here are two.

First, it ensures that you won’t be derailed by events or crises appearing out of a clear blue sky. Burnham is clearly more driven by domestic affairs than international affairs, and his speech today, in which neither foreign policy nor Europe was mentioned, confirmed this. But the world will have other ideas. Something, somewhere, is going to happen and it will threaten to devour his premiership. This is what happened to Tony Blair, with September 11 and the invasion of Iraq. A clear plan, a policy to-do list, can help a government stay on track.

But this has a second advantage. Clear direction set from the top lets everyone else in government – ​​ministers and, in particular, civil servants – know what they are supposed to do. The unlikely role model here is Margaret Thatcher. In the Thatcher era, even the youngest civil servant, faced with a political choice, knew what the boss wanted: he knew how to choose the option which was, roughly, less state, more market. Today, Burnham deplored the Thatcherite deal by which “political power was centralized and economic power was privatized”. This sentence effectively tells Whitehall what the Prime Minister wants: namely the opposite. He wants to see political power transferred and a more active economic state, not afraid of public ownership.

This political strategy must be accompanied by a political strategy. Starmer alienated much of his own party by following a game plan designed by McSweeney. His target was “hero” voters, often sitting in red wall seats, including those who voted for Brexit in 2016 and subsequently supported Farage. McSweeney’s approach was based on a crucial error, which was once again exposed by May’s state and local elections. Yes, the job was lost seats to reform, but this did not happen due to a mass defection from the Labor Party. votes to the Reformation. Rather, it was the result of former Labor voters defecting to other parties, whether the Greens, the Nationalists or the Liberal Democrats. With the anti-Reform vote fragmented, the Reform Party was able to pull through and win.

As political science professor Rob Ford points out, the most striking evidence of the phenomenon, although inverse, is one that Burnham knows well. In the Makerfield by-election, Ford told me, the growth in the Labor vote was “almost identical” to the decline in the combined vote for the Greens and Lib Dems. Burnham’s success at Makerfield was less about winning back the Farage curious, although Burnham may have won over some, and more about unifying the anti-Farage camp. Additionally, polls show that Labor voters who joined the Greens or Lib Dems are much more open to coming back than are the defectors from the Reform Party. These are low-hanging fruit. Whereas, Ford says, a Labor strategy focused on the tiny number of Reform voters willing to give Labor another look is a strategy focused on “a mythical breed”, which will forever remain out of reach.

The ideal is a program with broad appeal, cutting across the culture war battle lines that tend to separate, say, Green and Reform voters. Burnham may have been hinting at this when he said he would not try to “outdo the Greens or outdo the reformers”, but would instead be “typically Labour”. Such a path would focus on the issues – public services, the cost of living – that everyone cares about, rather than issues destined to alienate and divide.

Easier said than done, of course. Andy Burnham is about to take on a dangerously difficult task, one that has cost the lives of so many others. He says he’s ready. For the sake of the country, we must hope he is right.