Until Thursday, this opening entry had changed several times this week, but with an unexpected vacancy at Makerfield, things fall into place. Suddenly there is a pause: the clocks of the world stand still. Wes Streeting ceases plotting behind the arras, Angela Rayner keeps schtum. There is now a powerful potential outcome that could feasibly change the narrative completely.
The emergence of Andy Burnham just might represent a fundamental renaissance of the left. Might… Clive Lewis (Norwich S) is part of Team Burnham, and as he points out, Mr Burnham is not the messiah. Fortunately though, he is rather more than just a naughty boy. As Mr Lewis explains:
“Burnham’s possible return matters not because of what it says about Labour’s leadership, but because of what it reveals about the British state: what it can still do, what it has forgotten how to do, and what kind of country it must become if it is serious about resilience.
“Britain has spent 40 years building the opposite. The privatisation of essentials – energy, water, transport, housing – transferred wealth upwards from households to shareholders while making the basics of everyday life more expensive. The state, stripped of the tools to control costs at source, has been reduced to compensating after the fact.”
Your diarist is usually dispassionate about politicians – passionate about politics, but dispassionate about its practitioners. A few are monsters or mountebanks, but we all know who they are. Most politicians mean well and are hardworking, but not a few are timorous. (Some of Labour’s present intake of MPs fear to diverge by as much as a comma from the party’s ‘line to take’.) But whisper it soft… there is enough about the emerging Burnham scenario potentially to win over even your curmudgeonly old diarist.
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The King’s Speech was the last straw, and Keir Starmer’s troops at last ran out of patience. The somewhat reluctant goodwill with which he entered No.10 two years ago has been squandered through timid conformism and to no purpose. He admits he doesn’t really understand politics – a fact confirmed by reports that he has now re-employed Morgan McSweeney to help him through this crisis.
Still, there is a suspicion that he bravely holds to ideas of public service that went out with Nankeen pantaloons. He gives the impression that one day we will see his face under the peak of a Salvation Army cap. But though meaning well may be somewhat to his credit, change is imperative, and Sir Keir only wants to mend things.
(We may have to wait for posterity to explain how ‘a good man’ locks up peaceful protestors for holding up bits of cardboard or deports migrants with settled status because they have foreign names.)
But this week’s events have all but ensured his tenure cannot last, though a few months more may at least offer him the opportunity to strike his colours with some vestiges of dignity.
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The question until a couple of days ago was: who could replace Keir Starmer? “Weasel Wes” Streeting has always been seen as the front-runner, at least by himself. He was expected to go in, studs up. One Labour MP calls Mr Streeting a “self-interested lizard”, while yet another asks: “How can you tell Wes is plotting? He’s still breathing.” Though one MP tells Pecksniff that at least Mr Streeting knows all his backbench colleagues by name, which is much better than some of his cabinet colleagues.
But by Wednesday, my dears, Labour MPs seemed to be so melting in panic you could have poured them out with a spoon. “We have to face up to the fact that every one of them is f*cking useless”, was one observation. Another remarked: “They’ve f*cked it. Everything is falling apart.” While another sagely assessed the situation with: “It’s a big shit cocktail. We’re all doomed!”
But then on Thursday, out of the blue and with all hope lost, Andy Burnham and Makerfield showed up like Gandalf at the Battle of Helm’s Deep, and everything stopped. From bending the elbow with some of Bylines’ finest over lengthy potations in the saloon bar, it was clear the political outlook had changed dramatically. Frank the bus driver began quoting Ovid, which is always a sign something is up.
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This entry originally began with the words: “The trouble is: Andy Burnham is standing in the wrong place. His odyssey back to the Commons looks fraught. Getting pissed with the Cyclops is nothing compared with schmoozing an available seat in the northwest, conveniently full of Everton supporters, then persuading them to vote for him and not Reform.”
Image by House of Commons via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)
But that was before the saintly Josh Simons gave up his seat and his career to the cause. It seemed unlikely Labour’s National Executive would dare refuse Mr Burnham a second time, not without the danger of a public lynching. At the time of going to press, they have given him the green light. So, that just leaves persuading the electorate. There are obvious reasons why that may prove difficult, but it hardly seems an overstatement to point out that Mancunians actually love their mayor – and so do Wiganers. He is one of them, he is simpatico, a good communicator, and he delivers.
In fact Manchester treasures in its mayor many of those issues Reform relies on to pull in the punters. Like Nigel Farage, Andy Burnham is a disruptor, something of a Jacobin: his views and policies offer an enthralling difference from the cynically choreographed veleta danced by Labour in Westminster. Reform voters are predominantly working class, and they want the kind of things Burnham has been delivering in Manchester. His success as mayor has been noted: he won every ward in the last mayoral election.
In his favour, at least in the eyes of your humble echotier, are his ambitions: a 10-year plan, introduction of some form of proportional representation, and a return to the EU. That, my dears, would do for starters.
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“We’re going to get rid of a thousand immigrants a month!” cried one exultant Reform supporter into his phone in Beccles.
Dear reader, it is difficult to know quite where to start, but this claim so aptly captures the smorgasbord of delusion, ignorance and philistinism of those who voted for the party. But let us try… The election was for a councillor, not an MP, and so has nothing to do with immigration. Even if it had been for an MP, he would have been one of only nine from Reform, and the next general election is not for more than three years.
There are no means of rounding up people willy-nilly, and if there were we know from the polls that the British public would not tolerate it. This is the UK, not the US, and President Trump and all his works are anathema here. And anyway, there are an estimated 10.7 million UK residents who were born elsewhere, so at the rate of a thousand a month, expelling them would take 916 years.
In the five days following last week’s elections, 30 new Reform councillors became embroiled in scandals and controversies – ten from East Anglia alone – and had either been expelled or resigned. One of them was under the impression that they had been elected as an MP. Several more resigned across the country on realising they would not be paid.
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We go on. In addition, the new Reform councillor for the Harbour division of Lowestoft – an area of notable deprivation – is best known for his opposition to a mansion tax. The party’s councillors in Ipswich have been told they are not permitted to speak to the media by their chair, a man who was suspended while a Conservative councillor, for his outspoken support for Russia and Putin. (Readers will recall we are declared by MI5 to be at war with Russia.)
The councillor for Rayleigh West for the county, and Sweyne Park and Grange for Rochford district stands accused of having called white people “the master race” and Muslims “rats”. He also responded to reports of the rape of Sikh and Muslim women: “Good. Reap it.”
Then there is Councillor Ryan Coogan, representing Ramsey in Huntingdonshire. The Hunts Post reported last October: “A parent, who is also the leader of the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough branch of Reform, has made “false, malicious and defamatory” claims that a school’s principal is leaving amidst misconduct allegations. In a public newsletter, Ryan Coogan stated that Zoe Andrews has resigned from her role at Cottenham Village College. However, Astrea Academy Trust – which runs the school – said this is not true and that it is an attempt to “harass Mrs Andrews in her position as principal”.
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But look at the analysis of the local election results. For all their apparent successes, Reform still holds only 4% of the country’s councils; and according to pollster Peter Kellner’s reckoning – in a calculation before the voting – Reform’s winning only 1,400 seats would represent a disaster for them. In fact they only managed to poll a little over that.
So given the controversies, the proven incompetence, the disillusion when councillors find they aren’t paid, can’t stop the boats and won’t be sitting in parliament, we should expect impatience and frustration. There is a possibility which should not be disregarded: how long before Reform splits?
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Now here is another delicious ‘what if?’ on which to ponder, courtesy of the editor in the saloon bar when on her second bottle of Bacardi. Readers will have read that Nigel Farage, already under investigation by the Commons authorities for 17 breaches of their rules on financial disclosure, is also under scrutiny for not declaring regular use of a private helicopter and also that handy contribution of £5 million just before he changed his mind about becoming an MP.
It is difficult to see how one or the other alleged transgressions will not be upheld, in which case Mr Farage faces a potentially long suspension from the Commons – long enough to trigger the circumstances for a by-election in Clacton. All that publicity about how much moolah their MP is minting ought to make some kind of dent in our man’s popularity.
But just in case it doesn’t, just suppose Rupert Lowe (Gt Yarmouth), who fancies himself as kryptonite for Nigel Farage, decided to put up a candidate for his Restore Party, perhaps renamed Clacton First for the occasion. It is difficult to see how this would not mortally split the far-right vote, leaving Mr Farage a loser.
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Leaving the political melodrama at this point is rather like the end of a TV series, the suspense teetering on the brink till the next exciting episode. And in a way it is. Whatever happens in politics over the next three weeks, the diary will be suspended while Pecksniff is in the Netherlands, studying the works of Hieronymus Bosch and the possible influence of his ‘Temptation of St Anthony’ triptych on Wes Streeting’s indecision on whether to challenge Keir Starmer. So the next diary will appear on 13 June.
In the meantime, politics will get its breath back after this tumultuous week, and it is to be hoped that, during the interim, readers may join your diarist for occasional political discourse on Bluesky, @pecksniffsdiary.
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This week’s inteligencers were Linda Buckmaster, Karl Whiteman, Liz Crosbie, Mary Marshall, Andrew Coates, Helen Forte, Celina Błędowska, Malcolm Lynn, James Porter, David Patey, John Elworthy, Stace Richards, Mark Cunliffe and Yasmin Gregory.
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