It’s now all but certain that in under three weeks’ time Andy Burnham will be Prime Minister. A mere month after the by-election that got him back into parliament. A staggering turnaround even by today’s excitable standards. Point of fact, as our Political Correspondent Peter Spencer reports, it’s thought that he would have preferred to have had a bit more time to sort himself out.
As it is, rather like Lenin stumbling back to Russia from his Swiss exile in 1917, he’s got to grab the reins of the revolution straight away.
As the Malvolio character spotted in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.
Not that Burham didn’t want it, mind, ever so much. It just would have been nice to have had a couple of months or so to assemble a team to help swivel the country round to his way of thinking.
Cue the inevitable tsunami of tittle-tattle about about what exactly he does plan to do about reviving the fortunes of the nation. And the Labour party. Good luck with both, say even his well-wishers.
We should get some kind of clue, at least in broad outline, in a big speech he’s planning this coming week.
If nothing else it’ll give him a chance to do what he does best, and what Keir Starmer was so spectacularly and utterly useless at, generating a narrative.
Seems it’s not what you say but how you say it that makes the difference. Witness cheery chappy Nigel Farage more or less singe-handedly delivering Brexit a decade ago, and now plausibly vying to win the next general election.
He has however been getting pretty tetchy of late when confronted in interviews about the five million smackers passed his way, by a crypto-billionaire chum, before he became an MP.
Grumpy is neither a good look nor his style, and could well dim his star in time. The more so as the gift in question is now being checked out by parliament’s standards watchdog. A space to watch there.
Meantime, Burnham will be our fifth Prime Minister in four years. Each one promising change, something better than what came before. Fat lot of good it did the others, has to be said, judging by their vanishingly short shelf life.
What’s different in his case, indeed what got him over the line in Makerfield, seems to be his knack of weaving hope into his message. Getting folk to like him, same as Boris Johnson, at least until everyone went off him.
This standout strand certainly worked well for Burnham when he was Manchester Mayor, though he’ll need a whole lot more than that in Number Ten.
Cue the following unforgettable line from the fifteenth century poet John Lydgate:
‘You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.’
Given Britain’s strapped state moneywise, thanks in no small measure incidentally to Brexit according to almost all economists, our new Prime Minister has a lot of tough choices on his hands.
Who he chooses as a next-door neighbour is therefore, and unsurprisingly, the current focus of much of the media chatter.
Frontrunners are said to be the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and the Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, with him as the current favourite.
He and Burnham have been close for years, and it’s said he’s been hooking up with the incoming PM’s team a lot of late, though it’s also said that the new boss will not be following the lead of the old one.
When Starmer got in he more or less ceded complete control of the exchequer to his Chancellor, apparently forgetting that the PM is also First Lord of the Treasury. Widely seen as a mistake, Burham doesn’t plan to repeat it.
If Miliband does move into Number Eleven he will of course bring with him his net zero agenda, which naturally enough plays to mixed houses.
On the one hand there’s the collective scientific view that the biggest threat facing humanity is the climate emergency, an argument given added heft by the scarily steamy and record-breaking weather we’ve had to put up with of late.
Against that there are trade union voices raised in defence of North Sea oil, and jobs lost due to lack of new exploitation.
That discussion is highly nuanced, but the overall dilemma is neatly summed up by the American President’s elegant and insightful take on Burnham.
‘I don’t know anything. I see that he was, I guess, mayor of a town. I hear he’s extremely liberal. Extremely. So that means he probably won’t open up the North Sea.’
Oh yes, that old chestnut. Drill baby drill, climate change is a con-job. Makes you wonder if even he believes the drivel he dribbles out on an hourly basis.
Which brings us on to what is or isn’t dribbling out of the Strait of Hormuz.
The likelihood of lasting peace breaking out any time soon is certainly much on Trump’s mind now that his whacko wheeze in Iran is threatening to fragment his MAGA base.
In addition, the outcome’s going to figure mightily in the mind of whoever ends up as Burnham’s Chancellor.
With a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied gas normally flowing freely through the Strait, the lack of it inevitably forces up costs on everyone, everywhere.
And the wobble it caused in the tentative uptick in Britain’s economy so distressed the normally right-leaning Daily Telegraph that it renamed The Donald’s Operation Epic Fury. Calling it instead Operation Epic Fiasco.
But the consensus among all politicos with an ounce of sense is that what any successful leader needs above all else is luck. And it’ll be very much the wrong sort of it if the Iran nastiness drags on and on.
However adept the new Treasury team turns out to be in terms of establishing priorities and shelling out the dosh, they won’t have as much as they would have had if it hadn’t started in the first place. And less still if it doesn’t get sorted.
But do not for a moment accuse our colonial cousins of doing nothing but horrid things.
Look no further than Lynea Lattanzio, who has over the past thirty-three years cared for no fewer than forty-four thousand cats at her sanctuary in California.
Why? She puts it simply: ‘When you take a cat that’s almost dead and you bring it back to full health and help get it adopted, that really warms your heart. It’s fulfilling.’
Oh really? American Vice President JD Vance claims that the Democratic party’s downfall is thanks to, in his words: ‘A bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives.’
OK, maybe she really is the archetypal crazy cat lady. But crazy can be good. People travel across the globe, just to get s glimpse of the place that she’s named The Cat House on the Kings.
Right now Ms Lattanzio’s looking after seven hundred of the dear little creatures. And she sure as hell ain’t complaining.
Watch Peter’s report at peterspencer.org
Peter Spencer has 40 years experience as a Political Correspondent in Westminster, working with London Broadcasting and Sky News. For more of his fascinating musings on the turbulent political landscape, follow him on Facebook & Twitter.