No good deed goes unpunished. Or any deed for that matter. It was only a few weeks ago that Keir Starmer was insisting he would remain an MP until the next general election. So we should all probably have guessed that he would be off at the earliest opportunity. U-turns were a distinguishing feature of his two years in office.
And what former prime minister could resist upstaging the new one hours before his first appearance at the government dispatch box for 16 years? Especially when the new one had been plotting his downfall for at least a year. It’s what everyone would have wanted. Right?
Not that Starmer was framing his decision in these terms. This wasn’t a simple matter of revenge. Or a need to still feel relevant. These were the last things on his mind. Keir has only ever wanted what was best for Andy. But he now had his own life to think about. And why tell the world about it on a bank holiday weekend when nobody is paying attention to the news, when you can wait till the first day of the new parliamentary session and grab the headlines?
Keir said in his statement that he had really meant it when he said he would remain MP for Holborn and St Pancras, but it had only latterly dawned on him that this would be incompatible with his ambitions to be a player on the international stage. Please spare us from another Tony Blair. There again, Keir is unlikely to be invited on to Donald Trump’s Board of Peace. He should use that as his calling card.
In truth though, Keir had never seemed that interested in representing his constituents or serving as a backbencher. He’s not like Theresa May, who remained, sad and alone, on the backbenches for years after being removed by her fellow Tory MPs. Nor does he have the inclination to follow the example of Rishi Sunak and turn up to work every couple of months or so. Perhaps he is more in need of the money that might come from leaving the Commons. And for a prime minister, Starmer had always seemed curiously uninterested in politics. So much so that you wondered why he had ever become a politician. It probably just felt like a normal career progression.
Meanwhile, Burnham could probably live with being pushed down the news agenda for the day. He had mixed feelings about Keir’s decision. In the long run, life would probably be easier without Starmer around to cause trouble, but the downside was a potentially tricky byelection. Especially if Zack Polanski chose to stand for the Greens. And never forgetting an almost obligatory appearance from Count Binface. But this would all be for another day. Right now he had a Commons statement on the government’s direction to negotiate.
First, it was a time to be gracious. After saying he would be following his predecessors in reaffirming his commitment to Ukraine, Burnham spent the first few minutes of his speech praising Keir. He had given a lifetime of service, had created a platform for change and had made the Labour party electable again. You could almost believe he was sorry to see him go.
Then we got to the heart of the matter. Less policy, more positive vibes. Andy hadn’t come to the Commons to pick a fight with the opposition. Rather he hoped they would listen to him, realise he was right and then work with him. It was a big ask – especially with Kemi Badenoch as leader of the opposition, and so disinhibited she can pick a fight with herself – but probably worth a go. Just on the off-chance. Andy wasn’t going to give in to point scoring without at least attempting to offer a hand of friendship.
We ran through a wishlist. The climate crisis. Surely no one was going to argue with that, not after the emergency in Nepal and the hottest summer on record? You could sense Kemi longing to intervene, to say that net zero was a con. It took all her self-control not to make an idiot of herself.
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Burnham began. Small boat crossings down: tick. More prison places for the right kinds of prisoner: fingers crossed. Defence: that would be sorted later, somehow. The cost of living: we need to be honest that the country has been in decline since 1980.
“I will be relentless about achieving change and growth,” he said. First he had taken Manchester, now he takes the UK. A Britain that would work for all of us. A desire to keep upbeat. The country had had enough of being told it was falling apart. Let the good times roll. Ish.
We can make the next decade better than the last, he concluded. That suddenly didn’t feel quite so comforting. I mean, the next 10 years can hardly be worse than the shitshow of the last 10 years. Can it? Can it? Please. We need some reason to get out of bed each morning.
As for Kemi, let’s also be generous. She did at least try to sound as if she had listened and would work at doing better to find common ground. Though she couldn’t do this without sounding vaguely patronising. As if Burnham was some sort of ingenu who had been parachuted into Westminster without a clue as to what he was doing, and she was the old lag who had seen it all before.
“I’ll be gentle,” she said, as if Andy was a halfwit, before going on to say that almost everything he had said was totally wrong. The decline in small boat crossings was just a coincidence. Margaret Thatcher had taken office before she had been born, so therefore anything Thatcher had done was totally irrelevant. Kemi thinks the world began with her birth and will end with her death. The narcissist’s fantasy. She promised to help when it was in the national interest, but the national interest would only be served if she was in charge.
Andy tried to let her down gently. He was here to help too. Kemi had gone to Rome and fantasised that Giorgia Meloni had told her not to do a deal with Reform. He would happily have saved her the air fare and told her the same thing. Then he took her by surprise – by pointing out she had just picked a shadow chancellor who had been the author of Liz Truss’s mini-budget. Kemi looked a little shell-shocked. She is going to have to up her game before tomorrow’s prime minister’s questions.
