The Good, the Bad, and the Starmerian

Sir Keir Starmer shouldn’t be a footnote in history. He won Labour a landslide two years ago not long after BorisJohnsonhadobliterated the party. Today, the Tories are dying and nobody eems to care; yet the credit doesn’t go to Starmer. But he kept Britain stable through global turmoil, with its wars and an untrustworthy US under Donald Trump, managing to raise defence and healthcare spending, and even bringing down illegal immigration. The lawyer who personified decorum on the stump, couldn’t however translate his mandate to governance. Public goodwill was quickly lost.

The black heart of the Starmer premiership though was the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US, with the Jeffery Epstein stain running too deep. As the government seemed directionless, Labour’s historic defeats in local elections last month, losing power in Wales, coupled with the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, appeared to have put the party on the same path to irrelevance as the Conservatives. But then Andy Burnham engineered a byelection and won it by crushing Reform, showing Labour might still have a chance under a different leader. Starmer was dignified and gracious as he resigned on July 22 and he might yet have the last laugh—if Mr Rules can be expectedtolaughatthefuture discomfiture of colleagues who told him to go.

In Search of the Real Andy Burnham

A Blairite, a Brownite, and a Corbynite walk into a pub and the barman says, “What’re you drinking Andy?” Labour’s in-house joke might seem a bit unkind but Andy Burnham, in all likelihood the UK’s next prime minister, is known to be a chameleon, always riding the most fashionable ideology on the left. He was, at one point, on the right of the party, a Blairite even as culture, media and sport secretaryunderGordonBrown. Back then he had pushed through a second inquiry into the Hillsborough disaster of 1989 in which 97 Liverpool fans had died. By the time he became mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017, Burnham had moved to the left of Labour, refusing to resign in 2016 in protestagainstJeremyCorbyn’s leadership. But the lifelong Everton fan delivered: Greater Manchester brought busservice back under public control, integrated it with other modes of publictransport, anditworked. Hishome-buildingprogramme, promising no homelessness by 2020, was far less successful. His profile rose in the standoff against Boris Johnson’s lockdown, which he called contemptuous of northern England. Earning the moniker King of the North, Burnham didn’t govern as far from the left as he had campaigned. But will his local focus, the “Makerfield Test” as the new MP calls it, work for national policy?

Double Trouble

The next prime minister of Britain, the fifth since September 2022, will have to deal with the economy and decide on what to do about the fallout of Brexit. Andy Burnham, the frontrunner, still wishes the UK would rejoin the EU but that’s not on the cards. He has also pledged to revive the economy but by sticking to the Starmer government’s rules on borrowing and spending. With a cost of living crisis and dipping growth, and with welfare spending set to rise, which mixture of socialism and market economics will do the trick, if at all? Meanwhile, Brussels is waiting for the UK to make up its mind about how close it wants to come.