Burnham Week One: This is what a professional political operation looks like

He has a diagnosis, a proposed cure, and a strategy. Which is more than we can say for the last lot.

This is a chess game and we are watching someone move pieces across the board. Their behaviour is rushed, they’re clearly learning on the go, and their work will be strewn with errors. But it is deliberate. And God help me, being deliberate might just be enough. The standards of political leadership in this country have declined to such an extent that someone acting in a deliberate manner may actually be sufficient to earn them my confidence.

What we have seen this week is a professional political operation. Nothing more. Not a triumphant one, not one that is sure of victory, not one that is insulated against mistakes. But a professional political operation operating in a professional fucking way. Andy Burnham has a diagnosis and a proposed cure - in short, he has an argument, and he has a communication strategy to deliver that argument.

It is a delight simply to see someone operate with a degree of political competence. The basics are there, for the first time in what seems like decades, as if a restaurateur just discovered that you can put potatoes, vegetables and meat in one meal.

The diagnosis is sound. It is not perfect - you could quibble, certainly it’s simplistic, but it is valid. It is that since the Thatcher period we have centralised power and economic benefit. The centre has not functioned adequately or even at all, the economic benefits have been too restricted and have now stopped altogether. The cure is to fix Westminster, devolve power and reindustrialise.

The point on centralisation and the pathology of Westminster is unarguable and I’ve banged on about it at length so I’m not going to repeat it here. If you think Westminster works well I would encourage you to check yourself in for professional help and then afterwards buy my book on why you are wrong.

The point on industrialisation is a bit more TBC. There is something disturbingly backward looking about Burnham’s rhetoric - the nostalgia about manufacturing jobs, the old Labour tribute act, which ignores the fact that most party supporters, like most of the country, work in white collar jobs.

We are a services economy. It is good to be a services economy. It is nice that people can make money in nice, clean, safe jobs. There is this pervasive sentimentality to British politics, a perpetual harking back to the past - Brexiters with a desire to revert back to the days before Europe, Corbyn with his complete lack of interest in any development after 1980, Blue Labour with its men-down-pit-listening-to-Bernard Manning-on-the-weekends tribute act. And all this is of course combined with a kind of paranoia about feminisation - of society and of men themselves, of lanyards as some kind of impotence injection. Burnham’s mood music corresponds to that baseless nostalgia.

The key really is what he ends up pouring into that bucket marked ‘industrialisation’. If it means a return to the pits then it’s obviously insane. But if it includes all sorts of economic activities - tech and Net Zero, for instance - it is not. It’s just a nostalgic strategy for selling a modernisation project.

The early organisational moves have been very encouraging.

This week - in a decision which was barely covered by journalists but could prove one of the most consequential of his premiership - Burnham created a new Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (OPMC). This is the kind of thing which almost anyone who has looked into No.10 ends up suggesting.

The centre of British government is weak, sclerotic, neurotic and far too underpowered to function effectively. It does not have enough people and those people it does have are organised in an irrational way, stuffed randomly into various floors of a 17th Century townhouse. It is then surrounded by the Cabinet Office, which is a kind of management swamp, with no clear function, stuffed to the gills with all the different functions which didn’t fit in a specific department. It is the government equivalent of that drawer in your house with all the old adaptors and USB cables.

As the Institute for Government argued in its 2024 Commission on the Centre of Government, No.10 is “underpowered but compulsively involved in detail, with ambiguous structures that undermine the clarity of instruction from the prime minister and encourage in-fighting. There is an inward-looking bunker mentality, too closed to the external expertise and outside perspectives that are necessary to make the best decisions.”

This seems to be the report that Burnham and Cabinet secretary Antonia Romeo have used to model their own proposals. The OPMC will contain teams in the centre of government and the bits of the Cabinet Office facing the prime minister - including crucially the Cabinet secretariats. The parts of the Cabinet Office which relate to the whole civil service will be spun out into a new body called OneGov. I hate the name too, obviously - why can’t we give things proper names anymore? - but we have to accept the modern world and its utter inability to use words properly. At least it’s not called Cabinet Office 2.0, although I bet they fucking considered it.

The function of government is also likely to be improved by the establishment of No.10 North, which Burnham opened this morning. It’s based for now at Heron House in central Manchester, because it could provide the security required. They’ll be looking for something permanent in the meantime. The advantage is a question of basic spatial arithmetic. No.10 is too small to fit the kind of team needed to run a country of any size, let alone a major European state. Having more space means you can increase staff.

There are two primary dangers with No.10 North. The first is that this team will become irrelevant. Governments often found that staff in the Cabinet Office - just five minutes walk away - would be forgotten by the No.10 operation and become irrelevant. The same is obviously much more true for people on the other side of the country. The second is that a pointless competitiveness and tribalism will develop between the two No.10. I know this is stupid and childish but it is exactly what always happens in these sorts of scenarios, because humans are so very basic.

The first problem is solved by a regular prime ministerial presence and a large staff. Burnham is spending a day there a week - although whether this survives the crisis-politics era of Donald Trump is another matter. The think tank Re:State estimated that the government should aim for 300 staff within 18 months.

The second is solved by a set of distinct functions. Devolution and the economy are the focus at No.10 North while classic Downing Street functions - special advisors, private secretaries, press officers, hopefully policy and delivery units - remain in the traditional building. Burnham has put serious people with relevant experience and proven track records in charge of both No.10’s, with James Purnell in London and Caroline Simpson in Manchester.

This is an impressive move. It’s not just that Burnham is making organisational changes. It’s that the organisational changes reflect the diagnosis. One of the Burnham team’s arguments about dysfunction at the centre is that No.10 lacks the economic brains to challenge the Treasury. This has led to a split personality problem in British politics with a mighty Treasury - crammed with staff, with a strong institutional personality, a firm view of the world and control of the purse strings - competing against a thinly-staffed and economically undereducated No.10.

Louise Haigh, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and first secretary of state - so basically the deputy prime minister - stated the argument explicitly to the BBC. The government needed a “proper beefed-up economic unit in Number 10 that both the prime minister and the chancellor have access to”. A source familiar with Burnham’s plans told the FT that “No.10 hasn’t been set up to be strong enough to drive through priorities” but that it will now be “much more activist in the economic space”.

These are concerted changes. Diagnosis, proposed cure, a plan for implementation. A controlling intelligence to the government’s actions.

The same is true for policy. This week saw four big announcements: an initiative to end homelessness, a cut to energy VAT, a reduction to bus fares, and a lowering of pub business rates.

Of course, most of the debate focused on where the money would come from. It is utterly absurd to see the fixation of the press on this issue when it is unable, or unwilling, to ask this question when it comes to something like immigration. The cost of the policies this week is probably around £1.74 billion. The cost of reducing immigration from the Office of Budget Responsibility’s assumption of 235,000 a year to the expected 130,000-150,000 a year for the next three years is £12 billion. This is why so much of the political reporting we get is unserious. It has such a tenuous grasp of the objective world.

Anyway, the much more interesting element of these policies is that they reflect an argument and that they transmit a message.

Burnham has repeatedly stated that people need some financial breathing space. They can’t afford a night at the cinema, they can’t afford a Friday night fish and chips. He knows that unless he is seen to be acting on that, he will not win people’s confidence.

Then it’s bam-bam-bam. Each item selected to corroborate the message, so that everything people are hearing and seeing corresponds to it. Breathing room, breathing room, breathing room.

This communication strategy is not an empty volley, a splatter of plastic buckshot. It is part of a structured approach to getting the public onside and keeping them onside. Eventually, we will see the ten-year plan. This is where the meaningful substance of what the government will do is contained. But while Burnham’s team gets to work on it, it needs to communicate a sense of urgency and values so that it can get people onside. ‘Yes: we know we need to work quickly to help. The things we prioritise are those that will help people as quickly as possible.’

Asserting this message buys goodwill. And that goodwill buys you the time over the summer to bring together your ten-year programme for the long term. A concerted change. A controlling intelligence to the government’s actions.

It almost feels shocking, at this point in British political history, to see a government operate in this way. It’s been so long. Which previous government actually had a diagnosis, a proposed cure, an argument at all? Which government finessed its organisational changes, its public utterances and its policies so that they all satisfied that argument, then broadcasted them until they were entrenched in the public mind? Which prime minister had the intellectual self-confidence we see on show here?

The honest answer is horrible: none since David Cameron.

Cameron was a cynical empty prime minister who mutilated the country with austerity then launched a referendum on the EU which obliterated his career and the nation’s material and political wellbeing. But the man had a diagnosis - too much state, spending too much money. He had a proposed cure - cut everything. And he had a communication strategy which sold it magnificently - as a way of damaging Labour, as a moral mission, as proof of the government’s seriousness. Every word of it was a lie, or imbecilic, or an act of self-harm. But it was a professional political operation.

Theresa May didn’t have the slightest idea what she was doing. She operated outside of the realm of meaning. “Brexit means Brexit” was, to this day, the most vacuous piece of political communication any post-war British government has constructed. Liz Truss was mad and could barely articulate what she wanted because she was too busy eating the carpet. Rishi Sunak was horribly confused and constantly shifting, desperately fishing for something - anything - that might save him. Maybe it was cancelling HS2? Maybe it was conspiracy theories about 15-Minute-Cities? Who knew? Not him.

Boris Johnson came closest to this kind of status - “Get Brexit Done” was hammered home until everyone understood it. But it wasn’t a diagnosis of real world conditions. It was a plastering over of extreme technical and legal problems with lies - “no border in the Irish Sea” - in order to secure an electoral aim. His levelling up agenda, which is superficially not that different to Burnham’s aims, could have been the basis for a thoughtful change to UK geographic inequality, but the man himself was too empty-headed to see it through, so it degenerated into an auction to secure funding through political fealty.

Starmer - and it gives me no joy to write this - was just as bad. There was no diagnosis, no cure, no argument. There seemed to be no thought on even the barest bones of a communication strategy. Take his statement that Israel could legitimately cut off water to Gaza. It’s ridiculous that he ever said this. The man was a human rights lawyer for Christ sake. But having said it he needed to correct it and yet he failed to do so for weeks on end. In the months that followed, Labour eventually adopted a more justifiable policy towards Israel, but the damage was done. It hemorrhaged votes on this issue alone.

The same could be said for countless other topics. Last autumn, Starmer called Farage’s deportation policy racist, then just as quickly briefed that he would take jewelry from refugees. What was the diagnosis? The cure? The argument? That strategy? Who was it meant to appeal to? It was a communication abattoir.

Now, after just five days, things have dramatically improved.

Lots can change. But on the face of the evidence before us right now, this is a professional political operation. It is getting the pieces in place. It has an assessment of what has gone wrong. It has a series of preliminary proposals intended to buy time for the ultimate solutions. The choices it makes help to substantiate the message. The policy and the communications are mutually-supporting.

It all makes sense. I know that seems a pathetically low bar to set for government behaviour, but it’s where we are right now. Beggars can’t be choosers.

On the early evidence, this is an effective operation. And by Christ it’s not before time.

Odds and sods

I’m on holiday this week. I think I’m in Kent, or perhaps Sussex, it’s unclear, but I can confirm that this little cottage has terrible fucking wifi and that everyone who lives here seems terribly happy with themselves. That means no podcast this week - sorry. I’m honestly not sure how I’ll even upload this newsletter.

Given I’m on holiday, it’s been inconvenient in the extreme for there to be a new government and you will appreciate quite how annoying it is that I have published four fucking pieces: One for the new progressive substack Arguably on the role of positivity, one extra piece for Striking 13 on Mahmood being kept at the Home Office (FFS), one for the i paper on the weird emotional space of the new government, and this one right here that you’re currently reading. It’s a wonder that I can be this positive about an administration that has sabotaged my time off.

The wonderful Naomi Smith, who needs no introduction, took over my correspondent duties on Late Night Live for the holiday that never happened. You can listen to that here.

I’ve been reading Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, which is one of those exquisite novels which zips along, making you laugh out loud every few pages, full of trenchant insights, and then you suddenly realise you just read 150 pages without even noticing. It is written by someone who hates things which can rightly be hated and loves things which can rightly be loved, and has all the right measurements of guilt and pride and hope. The commentary is sharp enough that it feels as if the book might cut your fingers, but it is informed by tender human feelings. A cracking read.

Right, I’m off to try and salvage what’s left of this holiday - fuck off.