AIBU to feel like Andy Burnham is an impostor?

[NotABeliever]

Whenever I see him on TV, my first reaction is a jolt of disbelief — as if Andy Burnham has somehow staged a stunt and pushed out the person who actually earned the right to be in Number 10 but somehow everyone is ok with this. It feels like a con, like he’s occupying a role that isn’t his.

What’s strange is that I don’t dislike Andy Burnham, and I’m hardly a devoted Starmer supporter. Yet something about the way Starmer was removed and replaced so abruptly feels fundamentally wrong and unserious . I keep thinking: Starmer is the one who won the election, not Burnham — so how is Burnham now the Prime Minister? It feels like a huge injustice.

I understand that in the UK we elect a party, not a president, and that whoever leads the party becomes PM. But even within that system, it’s hard to accept that a sitting Prime Minister can be shown the door simply for not being popular enough. With three years until the next general election, how can anyone confidently claim Starmer would have lost? Polls swing constantly.

It just feels like a moment of madness — a sudden upheaval that’s left us starting from scratch with a new cabinet and a new agenda, right when the previous team was in the middle of governing and getting on with the job. I can’t shake the sense that something about this isn’t right, and I’m struggling to make peace with it.

Sorry, will use text speak next time, wanted to give you the respect of a full answer to your very brief and completely unevidenced points.

Sorry for being "uninformed", when I literally cited support for all of my rebuttals.

Have a nice day x

What a pathetic response!

If you can't be bothered to read through a well reasoned & evidenced post on a political discussion thread then maybe don't be on such a thread?

If a post is too long to properly address, please don't quote it in your reply

"Silly remarks"? Are you a school teacher let out for the summer? I saw you accuse someone else of "wasting time". I could almost smell the chalk dust.

The only silly remark was drawing any sort of equivalence between minimising tax (which can be perfectly legal) and stealing from one's employer which is generally frowned on and can end with a criminal conviction.

No need to use text speech, perhaps avoid capitals and clichés though.

I could back anything up with "evidence", it wouldn't (a) make it true or (b) mean I'd done anything over and above a cursory Google.

No, the one piece of advice my father ever offered was to avoid becoming a teacher. I'm just a touch didactic, sadly.

You make a good point.

You may joke, but he shared naff all about his plans with the electorate prior to his coup, the PLP is not respecting any of the manifesto promises they were elected on and he doesn’t have any mandate from the country, only from Makerfield and his fan club in the Labour Party.

If he was a lizard person as you hilariously suggest, none of the public would know because apparently the electorate have no say at all and are not entitled to any information. What super progress.

It’s not the same people. I don’t like how Burnham was brought in and I liked Starmer. I don’t know enough about Burnham to have an opinion on him yet.

Sunak is a decent man. Johnson not so much.. Though both their FPNs were stitch ups.

Louise Haigh commited fraud, she was 26 and should have known better. Hopefully she's not like this now.

I have noted your points and assume they're in good grace - I am new to MN and apologise for any faux pas in terms of formatting. I don't like long posts either, but your post was also long, and I find debate stifled if someone can't cite evidence in support of a reply - it's all just vibes then isn't it, which is one reason the world is in the mess it is.

She was sacked because she did not disclose the fraud, not just because of the fraud. MPs are supposed to be transparent and act with integrity, it's why we have a ministerial code, no idea why people are willing to give them such a pass.

Fair enough.

@EasternStandard , Yes. The elections for the Scottish and Welsh devolved parliament.

The Conservatives and Labour did badly in Wales, but I think it was largely to do with the electorate being disillusioned with Labour locally and nationally, and the swing towards Reform was probably to try to stop Plaid Cymru from winning.

In Scotland, I think the Conservatives gained votes because of the SNP scandals.

Yes we vote for a party on the basis of the promises they made in their manifesto. Absolutely no sign of those manifesto promises now is there? The Labour Party is just taking the piss out of the electorate at this point.

I disagree and the Douglas-Home comparison doesn’t really stand up. Macmillan wasn’t hounded out or forced out in some kind of coup, he resigned because of serious ill health. Douglas-Home then emerged as successor through Conservative backroom consultations, renounced his peerage and returned to the Commons. That’s different from Burnham’s route, where a sitting MP had to make way for him so he could enter Parliament and position himself to become leader and PM. I dont see that the two situations are remotely the same.

Yep I didn’t like Starmer and happy the process was there to see him out.

Thanks

Arguably Starmer had no right to be there either. Labout got the lowest vote share of any winning party in history, so there was a legitimacy issue with that too. You cannot 'win' a 172 seat majority on 34% of the votes cast. It's not democratic, fair or justifiable. He was sunk from the get go because people simply didn't vote for him. If you get fewer votes than your previous leader who lost an election, but win a stonking majority off the back of it, that is a crisis of democracy. Labour kept banging on about being given a huge mandate and it was all rubbish. The electorate didn't give them a huge mandate, our voting system did.

Well it isn't as if the Tories didn't set a precedent (multiple times)...

Who do you think would get us out of the debt, not the Tories who tanked the economy despite their "austerity" approach, definitely not "in it to line our own / our funders' pockets" Reform... maybe the Greens with their wealth tax?

Ok thanks I’ve kind of lost the thread of this convo but I will say on the doorstep feedback it really did drive the change. Imagine if you had clients and they all wrote back we’d like to work with you but we cannot stand your MD so we’ll go everywhere bar you.

That’s what Labour MPs were hearing, so they acted on it.

This.

Personally I'd just like to have the PM for five minutes, like we did when we were a grown up country, and not have them roundly slated two minutes after they take office. Particularly when the party was elected with a comfortable majority. Let them do the fucking job.

Well, that's because she's a Labour MP and you seem more inclined towards her politics than not.

There's a huge pool of people with integrity who haven't committed crimes to pick from as politicians. I'm cosy with excluding those who have committed crimes, in my experience it's quite easy to obey the law.