Andy Burnham is now almost certain to receive a coronation as the seventh British prime minister in ten years. This is a rapid turnover without any precedent in the history of that great office. There was an apparently comparable sequence between 1827 and 1835, when Liverpool, Canning, Goderich, Wellington, Gray, Peel, and Melbourne succeeded each other as prime minister. But Liverpool retired because of declining health after 15 years in office and Canning died in office abruptly.
In the last ten years, Gordon Brown was defeated in a general election, David Cameron was defeated on the Brexit referendum, Theresa May defined leaving the European Union as remaining in it while claiming to leave and ended up with no support from either the remainers or the leavers. Boris Johnson won a resounding election victory and then completely alienated his own followers, who dumped him. Liz Truss produced the only sensible budget Britain has seen in 20 years and was rewarded by being evicted from office after 45 days. Rishi Sunak tried to run a nominally Conservative government by poaching on the Labour Party’s left-wing policy territory and Keir Starmer replicated Boris Johnson’s remarkable achievement of being thrown out like a dead mouse by the huge parliamentary caucus he led to victory, in less than two years.
As has been lamented in this column a number of times in recent weeks already, the United Kingdom, which has been generally and rightly considered to have the most stable and reliable system of political institutions of any major country over the last 340 years since the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1687, is now becoming a spectacle of revolving door government reminiscent of the French Fourth Republic. It is a depressing and incomprehensible state of affairs. (The upheaval of 1687, when James II was evicted by his ungrateful daughters, was not all that glorious.)
The Conservative achievement in producing five outright flops as prime minister in eight years is completely unchallenged in the British catalogue of political failure. The great party of Disraeli and Churchill and Thatcher has fallen on its own sword so often recently that it is a Swiss cheese. It is impossible to be optimistic about Mr. Burnham. He will have the distinction, I believe, of being the first Roman Catholic chief minister in London since Henry VIII beheaded St Thomas More, for refusing to approve of his divorce on spurious grounds that the king’s original marriage was not legal. This was a crisis which caused the king to apostatize altogether, seize the property of the Roman Church and transfer the papal encomium he had received, “Defender of the Faith” (still on the coinage, for a paper written for him by Erasmus), to himself in his new capacity of Supreme Governor of the Church of England. There is, in a sense, an element of sectarian reconciliation in Mr. Burnham’s likely elevation.
Burnham was a promoter of New Labour under Tony Blair and an opponent of Jeremy Corbyn and is an anti-nationalist collectivist rather than a pre-Blair slave of the irresponsible and narrow-minded Trades Union Congress. This makes Burnham less of a confrontationist than the far-left leaders of his party such as Corbyn and Ed Miliband and even Neil Kinnock. He wants to decentralise power but re-nationalise substantial parts of industry and would clearly prefer to reintegrate into Europe. He has also made some gratuitously anti-American comments which will not do him any good. He does not seem easily distinguishable in domestic policy terms from Keir Starmer but given his record as mayor of Manchester and a member of the Blair and Brown governments, he is probably a more consistent and purposeful executive than Starmer has been.
But he is absolutely on the wrong track. Britain needs a return to Thatcherism, reduced taxation and public sector spending and avoidance of being dragged down by the rigidified socialist mother state of the European Union. Labour only came to office under Starmer because the country couldn’t reelect the Conservatives. In winning a huge parliamentary majority two years ago, Starmer only raised the Labour percentage of the popular vote by one point; the new Reform Party on the Right and somewhat revived Liberal Democrats and Green parties on the Left all gained ground. All this splintering and fragmentation is the predictable consequence of incompetent leadership of the main parties and Britain is in danger of requiring a four-party coalition to govern as in Israel.
The burning questions are whether the Conservatives can regain the lead over Reform, which seems to be slipping slightly, and the two can make an arrangement that enables them to elect more MPs than the Left, which includes the Scottish Nationalists and provincial parties in Wales and Northern Ireland. Burnham will start on a tightrope with no safety net. He will probably be better organised than Starmer. But collectivist redistribution is not the answer to lifting the United Kingdom out of its torpor and restoring confidence in the political leadership.
