Rachel Reeves wants you to know she thinks Britain’s future belongs in Europe. She would also like to mention that she “absolutely” got all the big calls right as chancellor, even if there were a few things she would have done differently, and that John Healey’s budget last week would have been far harder for him if she hadn’t put in so much of the groundwork.
The gist of her argument in last weekend’s Sunday papers – previewing a lecture at Harvard University today, reflecting on her time in power – was essentially that if anyone imagines Andy Burnham somehow invented pro-Europeanism and putting more money in people’s pockets, they can think again.
Reeves was clearly devastated by losing a job she loved, and her return to the fray after a summer of quietly licking her wounds has inevitably sparked speculation over whether she now seeks a comeback. But her timing is acute enough to suggest that this goes a little deeper, coming as it does days after a deliberately low-key budget that left some Labour MPs wondering what happened to the much-hyped end of neoliberalism.
How much of the Burnham agenda is really new, and how much is essentially the old Starmer one, repackaged with rather more warmth, charm and political skill?
Inside what’s left of the old inner circle, loyalists point out that Reeves and Starmer were both fervent remainers at heart and of course they would have loved to be back inside the EU one day; it’s just that the time wasn’t yet right to talk about it when they ran for office.
Similarly, the package of sanctions on Israeli settlers that the foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, announced in September, alongside an apology for what he considered Starmer had got wrong on Gaza, wasn’t a dramatic break with the past but essentially the measures his predecessor, Yvette Cooper (now health secretary), had spent her last weeks at the Foreign Office working up, which couldn’t be published until a new prime minister was formally in place.
Starmer’s former close lieutenant Darren Jones, meanwhile, is openly arguing that this administration’s answer to a looming crisis in defence spending – basically shunting the hard questions about funding it into next year’s spending review – is “what Keir and Rachel were going to do”, if only they hadn’t been forced out by the very same John Healey resigning as defence secretary in protest at something remarkably like the strategy he’s now pursuing. Starmer himself, who has kept his counsel over the summer, made a rare public intervention in Dublin last week to warn pointedly that the US withdrawal from European defence will outlast the Trump era, and Europe cannot afford to be left exposed.
If the Starmerites are understandably smarting at what some see as history being rewritten by the winners, some are also failing to recognise their part in their own downfall. Starmer was ultimately ousted by his own MPs because they wereexasperated by his failure to lead and sensed the country had turned inexorably against him.
Burnham has shown not only that he can take decisions – across Whitehall there seems to be more clarity now about what Downing Street wants – but that he can build the emotional bond with the public his predecessor couldn’t, without which even the boldest moves wouldn’t have worked. He might only have moved the needle fractionally on issues such as Palestine or Europe, where the manifesto red lines effectively mean nothing significant can change that wouldn’t have under Starmer, at least this side of a general election. But each time he has done just enough to achieve the political impact that Starmer was seemingly chasing but couldn’t pull off. Where his predecessor could never quite get the dosage right, Burnham seems to instinctively know how far to go: it’s the difference between a novice cook clinging fixedly to a recipe that isn’t quite right, and an experienced one who tastes and adjusts the seasoning as they go. And judging by the polling, it’s working.
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Yet still some MPs are anxious to hear a bigger vision of where Burnham wants the country to go than fixing social care and banning people listening to loud music on the bus. Since there wasn’t one in the budget, all eyes are on the 10-year plan, now expected some time in December.
Burnham has made much of promising to give Britain some breathing space after years of rolling crises and financial struggle. But the small, popular changes he has offered so far – £100 off your energy bills, a No 10 North office in Manchester – have also been in part about buying some breathing space for himself while he gets to grips with bigger and potentially more controversial challenges, from welfare reforms to defusing a Labour revolt over Shabana Mahmood’s plan to make migrants wait longer for the right to settlement.
A confident and relaxed debut has masked the fact that transitioning from mayor to prime minister was always going to be a steep learning curve, and that he didn’t get the long summer of planning that his team had wanted to prepare for power. But now that period of grace is coming to an end, along with a period of silence from those he ousted, some of whom are keen to defend their legacies. By Christmas we should know whether Burnham is offering genuine new thinking in British politics, or something more like the old kind, regifted.
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