I don’t know where Andy Burnham found his magic lamp, but I hope he’s taking good care of it. In the early hours of Friday morning, the genie that’s looked so kindly on him these past few months granted him yet another wish, with a byelection win in Holborn and St Pancras. It was just the latest gift for a prime minister for whom things keep going right – and who is especially blessed in his choice of opponents.
Let’s start with that win in London, where Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali defeated the Green party leader, Zack Polanski. It’s easy to miss how rare such a victory is. As the veteran psephologist Peter Kellner pointed out, this was a win that “defied history”. If the past half-century were any guide, Labour should have lost, thanks to a “truly dreadful record” defending its own seats when in government and facing a byelection challenge from the left or centre-left, the likes of the Greens or the Lib Dems. The average swing against Labour in such contests had been 24%. “On those figures,” wrote Kellner, “Polanski should have won at a canter.” But he lost.
That reinforces the case Burnham made for why he should replace the previous Holborn and St Pancras MP, one Keir Starmer, as Labour leader: namely, that he was uniquely placed to defeat challenges from both left and right. This latest win over the Greens, coupled with his own success in Makerfield in June, is early vindication of that argument.
Burnham can claim much credit for the London result: it’s his leftward shift that has persuaded many progressive voters that they don’t need to vote Green to get what they want and that they should give Labour another chance. But Burnham really ought to share the credit with Polanski himself, who has proved a most generous adversary.
Yes, Polanski brought an initial surge in energy, enthusiasm and membership to the Greens. But under him the party has steadily dismantled the moral halo it once enjoyed as the UK’s foremost advocate for the planet, reshaping itself into something darker. Thanks to Sunday’s conference vote branding Zionism as racism, which Polanski ducked, the party now demands the destruction of a state founded, and still regarded by most Jews, as an essential refuge, one whose creation was approved by a UN vote. “Destruction” is not metaphorical, by the way. The motion passed says that the change it seeks – a Palestinian state replacing, rather than existing alongside, Israel – must be secured “by all available means”, a phrase clarified in an accompanying booklet produced by the motion’s proposers to include “armed struggle”. Meaning, violence.
Thus have the Greens allowed themselves to become toxified by the kind of cranks and bigots whose manias crowd out anyone who dares hold a moderate or nuanced view, including many longtime, dedicated local activists. A moment like this calls for leadership, but all the Greens have is a quack hypnotherapist who once earned a living promising to make women’s breasts larger and who, when faced with a difficult decision, ran away. (Now, after the event, Polanski says he would not have voted for the Zionism resolution.) Instead of a leader, the Greens are stuck with a charlatan and a coward.
No wonder former leader Caroline Lucas could not say yes, when asked by Newsnight, whether Polanski should stay in his post. Burnham himself would have no such hesitation: the PM might even be quietly pleased that Polanski performed just well enough in Thursday’s byelection to fend off an immediate challenge. The longer Polanski leads the Greens, the better for Labour.
Meanwhile, Burnham’s other opponents seem similarly determined to do him a favour. Of course, there will be stormier times ahead, but the party conference season now concluded was like a warm, extended summer for the prime minister.
Reform UK, for so long Labour’s strongest challenger in the polls, saw its moment in the sun clouded by eve-of-conference revelations that two senior aides to Nigel Farage had been caught on film apparently discussing how they might get around UK electoral law to take a £500,000 donation from a US benefactor. In politics, the scandals that bite hardest are those that confirm suspicions the voters already harbour. In this case, three in four Britons told YouGov back in July that they regarded Farage as sleazy, with 56% describing him as “very sleazy”.
The party’s leading lights tried to make assorted policy announcements, but the only debate that really cut through was the one started by Suella Braverman, with her eccentric and exclusivist insistence that certain minorities, even those born in England into families rooted in the country for several generations, are not truly English – a definition that would exclude Rishi Sunak and a good portion of the England football team. Farage’s army of would-be mavericks and rebels looks increasingly like a rabble of crooks and spivs and – as if to prove the Greens have no monopoly on the demographic – cranks and bigots.
All this has created an opening for the Conservatives to reclaim their place as the dominant party of the right – but here, too, the genie has smiled on Burnham. True, Kemi Badenoch continues to enjoy higher ratings than her party, but that isn’t saying much. True, too, that she has, belatedly, woken up to the fact that victory will not come solely from trying to out-Reform Reform – people will always vote for the real thing – and that she has to appeal to that vast swathe of Middle England seats lost in 2024 to the Lib Dems.
Her conference pitch – promising to abolish inheritance tax on even the most expensive homes, and to extend free childcare to those earning over £100,000 – might conceivably appeal to some of those high earners. But it draws a dividing line with Labour that Burnham could only have dreamed of. Now the Tories have made plain that, in an age of stretched resources, their priority is to help some of the richest people in the land. That is a battle Burnham will be itching to fight.
As for the Lib Dems, the PM will be only too happy to see them muddling along, an inoffensive receptacle for Tory-sceptic voters in parts of the country that would never go to Labour. Though Burnham wants to eat into their vote too, promising that he will, in the next term, deliver on two of their signature issues: Europe and electoral reform.
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He did that in a speech that was the highlight of the conference season, one that showed a politician who understands the importance of making arguments – and is comfortable making them. After Starmer, who was the opposite in both respects, listening to Burnham was like “gulping down oxygen”, one cabinet minister told me.
And yet, everyone at Labour’s top table knows that the weather will change soon enough. The government, and everyone else, is paying too much to borrow money. At some point, the welfare budget will have to be cut: Labour MPs may be applauding now, but they will be less cheerful when asked to vote for reduced benefits, especially as they face re-selection contests in their local parties, a process that gets under way as soon as January.
There’s a hole in defence spending to fill, the full sweep of public services crying out for cash, a US president apparently bent on driving up global oil prices and therefore inflation, and a civil service machine that ministers privately curse as bloated and ineffective. What’s more, the period we’re in right now – the middle of the parliament – is when governments should be focused entirely on delivery, driving through their agenda. Instead, vital time has been spent on the transition from one PM to another – time Labour will not get back.
For now, Burnham is lucky in his opponents, whose choices hurt them and help him. But the skies will eventually darken and, when they do, the prime minister will reach once again for that magic lamp – hoping against hope that it still works.
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Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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