Whatever people are seeing in Andy Burnham I'm missing it

Keir Starmer was the subject of multiple entries on this newsletter; a chronicle, as it were, of a resignation foretold. There is no doubt that the Prime Minister’s position had become untenable and, given that Labour Party politics is always in thrall to US political culture - even tho its home country's political culture is much more akin to say, Germany or the Netherlands - the party has at least avoided the mistake the Democrats made around Joe Biden. And Starmer too for his part avoided the selfishness of Biden in clinging on too long, which was decent of him. Perhaps that word itself would make a decent obituary to Starmer; decent. Clearly a limited politician, and certainly one unsuited to the current moment, but fundamentally a decent public servant and a decent man.

That is at least some kind of an impression. A decent, hard-working guy, happiest amongst his papers and briefs. Andy Burnham doesn’t even occasion that much of an assessment from me, largely because it seems so obvious that Burnham is just adopting a persona and I am not seeing the real him, that he is performing something that others do indeed seem to like. Of course, all politicians, indeed all people do this, but most of the better ones perform some version of what they actually are.

If pushed I might manage as a descriptor for the former mayor of Manchester ‘northern’, but, no matter how hard some try, ‘northern’ is not someone’s personality, anymore than anyone could grasp the essence of what my life has been about through saying ‘Midlands’. They could certainly identify some things important to me but they couldn’t get a read on my soul, as it were.

Perhaps Andy Burnham’s schtick is marketing ‘northern’ as a personality type to people not from the north, northmaxxing, in line with the apocryphal anecdote that he decided to play up his northernness in his first full week at university and never looked back thereafter. I wonder how I’d feel if I were from that part of the world myself. Certainly, I don’t think any northerner worth their salt would answer that their favourite biscuit was ‘chips and gravy’, not least because the northerners I know's main source of contention is that southerners think they’re all thick, and such an answer confirms southerner’s haughtier stereotypes of simple, stodge-based folk.

There seems to no doubt however that, whatever Burnham is selling, a lot of people are buying it, and not only that, that Burnham seems to fill a lot of people with hope. There have been multiple calls for optimism this week and moments of real sentimentality. Again, as in the case of Zack Polanski, I really don’t get this; I just don’t see what about this particular man could inspire such positive feelings. I mean he’s nice enough, and I’m sure he’s got the time of day for people, but to find him some kind of potential political saviour? What are people seeing here?

Now, bear in mind, I am atypically iterative and incrementalist in my political stances, and someone like Keir Starmer, grinding away at the work, watching the performance metrics and, crucially, actually winning an election, fills me with much more hope than Burnham does. For something to inspire hope in me, it cannot be vague. What gives me hope is serious people trying to solve hard problems, particularly if they are prepared to court some unpopularity when doing that, and Burnham to me, in all his doughy bonhomie, absolutely screams ‘If you don’t like these principles, I have others.’

As has been said, Burnham’s impressiveness has always been in inverse proportion to his proximity to power, which his previous distance from allowed whatever faction is currently feeling underrepresented to place their hopes in him. In fairness, Burnham himself normally knew exactly how to play the kind of distant soothing mood music the relevant grouping wanted to hear, how to flash the bit of leg required.

German has a great word, Projektionsfläche, a surface onto which things are projected, and Burnham has been that for left and centre-left hopes of all shades. He’s going to deliver electoral reform, a wealth tax, HS2 in full and he’ll make sure that the UK boycotts everything Israeli too. In this, he is the reverse of Keir Starmer, who has served as the same blank in a negative sense for everybody’s bugbear from the far-right to the far-left, accused of personally exonerating the grooming gangs from one side to killing kids in Gaza by the other, theories which fulminated in the space which Starmer’s personal diffidence left open.

For Burnham, it seems to be something in his own soothing blandness which allows this to happen, his children’s TV presenter air, even his soft, vaguely doughy expression and mistreated puppy eyes. From a distance, he seems the ideal politician you’d want to come and say, cut the ribbon on your leisure centre and have a glass of orange squash or even weak lager with afterwards, afterwards making small talk which avoids politics and focuses on music and sport. Andy Burnham would seem the ideal politician to be, for example, Mayor of a large progressive-leaning city, perhaps one where there are currently lots of buildings and projects to open. Any ideas?

Of course, people are also projecting onto Burnham because the stakes really are high. Even Nick Clegg gets that. This is likely the last go of the Labour Party and as such centre-left politics before one of our two genuine whackjob tendencies, the degrowth Greens or repatriation Reform, have a crack at the whip. If one rejects Burnham, the question can come ‘Well, do you see any hope at all then? Is there just no way of doing centre-left politics in Britain now?’

I’m the wrong person to answer this, for I was quite happy to see Starmer getting on with trying to improve the functioning of the economy and state for a few more years and believe that that was what Labour had been given a mandate for. I put more value on delivery than getting a candidate who’ll tut tut in a more Guardian-friendly manner about how awfully Israel is behaving, not in part because Starmer himself took concrete measures against Israel and in recognising Palestine. I’m more interested in tangibles than vibes and if nothing else Burnham is a further triumph of the Vibes Supremacy. The spate of touchy feeliness which his cabinet picks are displaying upon their nominations seems part of this; Andy Burnham is at base the physical manifestation of the Labour Party’s need for a big hug. His avatar on Twitter is a cartoon of himself, for pity's sake.

To be honest, I lost faith in British politics quite some time ago. Since Brexit, when the electorate voted to leave their largest market in order to become richer, it’s all been various shades of delusion to my ears, never more than in the left’s previous great platitudinal hope, Jeremy Corbyn, who provoked hope for the bizarre reason that he’d never changed his mind about anything. Well, no danger of that with Burnham; his views seem to be that of the last person he spoke to, as the joke he dislikes expresses. Personally, I get my hope from outside of politics these days and, to the extent that anything in the political world is hopeful to me, it’s things being delivered. ‘We’ll build a new station’ means very little to me; ‘A new station just opened’ is hopeful. After all, if making big promises of national transformation were intrinsically uplifting, Liz Truss would be an inspirational figure.

So the appeal of Burnham seems to be a matter of tone, like the way you like your lover's voice. Are there more concrete reasons for hope? In the case for the defence, two areas where I think Burnham’s premiership genuinely offers some grounds for optimism. Firstly, he’s interested in constitutional reform, and to a greater extent than Starmer seems to understand the linkage between political structures and political outcomes. He has after all seen devolution revitalise his patch.

Some continue to resist devolution entirely. There’s a certain kind of British constitutional conservative who thinks the UK went wrong with the Blairite reforms and that the ultimate aim has to be to row back devolution in its entirety and all will be well. Yet surely that person can recognise that trying to do five (and growing) party politics through a system set up to deal with two at a pinch just leads to chaos and no real relation between the public will and election results.

Just chiming ‘Blair should never have set up the Scottish Parliament!’ and saying that applause in the Commons chamber should be banned isn’t any kind of solution to abiding political chaos, nor can anyone really claim that our current constitutional set-up is working in delivering stable government; even Italy, long the butt of British political jokes, seems a model of stability compared to us these days. So there is a powerful conservative argument for electoral reform to create greater constitutional stability. If you like everything else in British politics - the monarchy, the Parliament, the existence of the United Kingdom - electoral reform is a way of protecting that.

Ironically for the right, the chief driver of the current instability is Brexit and its follies, but our voting system and constitutional structures are contributing too, and Burnham might at least understand the need for some change there. Not change for change’s sake; change to improve the health of our politics. After all, it’s in part these structures, and the build-up of electoral frustration it creates in the system, which cause things like Brexit, in which our chief foreign policy position was decided by voters taking a free hit at an unpopular government, to happen in the first place. Voters need pressure valves, and that includes occasional representation of nuts, not least because nuts tend to both secure representation and lose it more promptly in proportional systems.

I don’t support PR to create what Guardian midwits call ‘a progressive alliance’ – nor do I really consider a party like the contemporary Green Party to be progressive, considering their vision for the country seems to be positively prelapsarian, and the Lib Dems have never seen a housing development they didn’t want to block. Proportional representation should not be seen as somehow able to magically conjure up a new form of politics; our politics will remain our politics after its introduction.

However, I do think that PR would create a fairer way to manage our existing politics. The traditional argument for our current system of First Past the Post, that it keeps extreme parties out, seems less convincing in a five way split which could see an extreme party govern unilaterally on circa 25% of the vote via that system. Or any party being able to, really.

The French have this neat constitutional idea of proclaiming a new Republic. They’re currently on their fifth. It’s a weird idea, but you can just decide on a new Republican era, perhaps hold a constitutional convention with the proposed new arrangements, and get a mandate for it as De Gaulle in 1958. Such ideas are maybe a little highfalutin for British politics. Still, I do think something in that spirit might be necessary, a sort of symbolic broom cleaning of a political system delivering increasingly poor outcomes. That’s why I support granting votes at 16; it won’t change the outcome of many elections but it does bring new ideas and impulses in at very little cost.

There are excellent features of British political culture, such as our long tradition of democratic deliberation and our creation of a successful multinational state. However, these days British and particularly the English seem – ironically for a country that spend over a decade at war in part over constitutional reform – very bad between recognising the links between political forms and political outcomes, greeting anything from the refurbishment of the Commons to the creation of regional Mayors with ‘How much does this cost?’ In fact the British greet pretty much any societal or cultural development with this, and as for infrastructure investment, most British voters never saw a bridge which wasn’t a waste of money.

Yet those same English seem to have no trouble accurately diagnosing that our current political culture is sub-optimal, and I think Burnham might be able to change some things in a way which improves the system’s overall health. This is where his apparent comfort delegating power might come in very useful indeed, leaving him happy to lend a pleasant face to those driving political reform.

Ironically, circling back to where we started, the thing which gives me most hope about Burnham is how brutal he was to Starmer. He saw Starmer was fatally wounded in political terms and he didn’t hesitate, didn’t prevaricate, didn’t Biden; he planned in advance and had his knife well-sharpened when it came to wield it. Perhaps this sense of dramatic timing was the true benefit of Burnham’s vaunted English Literature degree.

Now, there’s only so much optimism this can fill me with, as Labour politicians have always been best at taking out other Labour politicians, perhaps because they’re the only other politicians Labour ones can conceive of to exist. ‘Like me but a bit less or more so.’ For Starmer’s part, his truly exceptional moment, outside of Labour tradition, was helping Boris Johnson to self-destruct; taking out a Tory rather than another Labour faction.

Nonetheless, Burnham was ruthless, he seized the crown, and perhaps there’s hope there. Burnham is going to have to get used to being hated and contested, and stuff like the ‘Makerfield test’, where every policy is supposed to be tested against the interests of his Manchester constituency, isn’t going to survive an explanation to the Japanese Prime Minister where Makerfield is. Yet the ruthlessness of Burnham’s political assassination of Starmer offers a hint of hope that behind that soft Pudsey bear face might just reside a political bastard. To the extent Burnham has a real personality beneath the character he plays on TV, I hope it’s that of a ruthless, cold-blooded and highly effective shit.