Burnham unopposed & likely to be PM by mid July

[Twiglets1]

Wes Streeting confirms on social media that he won’t stand as a candidate for the Labour leadership. He says that a contest where candidates spent the summer “exaggerating small differences” would not be good for the party or the country, and having spoken to Burnham, he is confident that that there is “a place” for the policies he has been advocating under a Burnham premiership.

The Guardian say this means it is now very, very likely that Burnham will be PM be mid July. It is conceivable that another candidate may come forward. But, apart from Streeting, no one else has publicly signalled an intention to stand, and with Burnham now a shoo-in, it is hard to imagine any other MP getting the support they would need to be a candidate.

heguardian.com/politics/live/2026/jun/22/keir-starmer-resignation-timeable-andy-burnham-labour-leadership-prime-minister-latest-news-updates?page=with%3Ablock-6a390a538f08adffab1e97fd#block-6a390a538f08adffab1e97fd

Streeting can not become PM because of his association with Mandelson, which ultimately has been Starmer's fatal wound.

I’m no fan of Streeting, so I’m pleased.

From what I’ve seen Burnham’s ideas seem to have changed very little since he last stood for the leadership.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/aug/23/andy-burnham-labour-metropolitan-elite

Thank you, I thought I had missed something but clearly not. He is the one who kept losing in the internal shitshows, so why do they want him now? I don't understand why Labour get power and then throw it away by self electing someone people have no idea about unless they live in a town up North. All I have heard of him is that he is very supportive of Trans rights, which is going to take us back to 2018 and gives Reform an in.

He was a prominent member of the Blair government back in the 2000s. Elected to Parliament in 2001, he rose very fast and was Health Secretary in 2009-10. Beaten by Ed Miliband when he stood for election as Leader in 2010 and by Corbyn when he stood in 2015. Shadow Home Secretary under Corbyn, which must have been a trial (I can't stand Corbyn). Elected Mayor of Manchester in 2017 and has been re-elected twice since then.

I suppose people who were very young before 2010 and don't take much interest in politics wouldn't have heard of him unless they lived in Manchester.

I very much hope Burnham is not a disaster waiting to happen. We need stability and we definitely don’t need the Reform party.

I am sure we will find out soon enough, once he is elected and the papers can run whatever stories they have planned.
Urgh.

Maybe you are a lot younger than some of us. He's been an MP before. He was often on Question Time. I don't mean this rudely, but look him up on Wiki. He's been around Westminster for longer than he's been Mayor of Manchester.

Edit to say, sorry, I haven't read all through and I see Gaspode has already filled in lots of details about him. Got to go. Bell's rung for the end of coffee break.

On the gender ideology point, my hunch is that a great many politicians have said they support it to win brownie points with the electorate, having given the matter no thought at all and wrongly assuming it's like supporting gay rights, i.e. an easy win with no downside and (nowadays) wide popular support. I hope very much that Burnham is in that camp and will take the opportunity of a fresh start to look into this and backtrack very rapidly. There is a huge downside to supporting gender self-ID, which is that it adversely affects women's rights, LGB rights and the safeguarding of children and other vulnerable people. Supporters often also seem ignorant of how the human body works, well-known facts about child and adolescent psychology, sociological phenomena like social contagion, and how the law works, not to mention having very poor critical thinking skills. It's a litmus test for me. If people can't see the issues with any of that how can I trust them to be right about anything else?

I think they should just get on with it, as he’ll probably win anyway. A contest is a good thing, but the continuity more important right now. I hope, regardless, that he lives up to his reputation.

Burnham historically has had stronger and longer connections with Mandelson - Whatsapp didn’t exist at the time. Mandelson has been a dominant figure in Labour for decades, anyone involved in government, shadow government or the upper end strategy/campaign groups in Labour will have “associations” with Mandelson, whatever they may say. He was a key figure in Labour throughout Burnham’s previous tenures.

Starmer took the risk of appointing Mandelson and it didn’t pay off. He isn’t the first to make that mistake, he probably won’t be the last. Trying to blame others for that appointment was probably the bigger mistake.

Streeting, like Rayner is one of the few actually WC success stories in the party. Its not a coincidence that both experience the same kind of negative campaigns that Abbott and McDonnell experienced when they were young enough to be in the running.

It is the same test for me. I voted Labour all my voting life and I’m over 60, except for the last one as I couldn’t get past a party that was supposed to be progressive but was totally regressive on women’s rights. I think there are many female former Labour voters who have been lost by Labour this way. We are likely to stay politically homeless. I’m in Scotland and recently either spoilt by ballot or didn’t vote. I nearly voted Tory based on my current Tory MPs good stance on this issue, but I couldn’t bring myself to.

Nobody will beat Burnham in an election but he has gone from not even in Westminster to PM in waiting almost overnight. At no point has he been tested on his policies and priorities - just some very syrupy soft focus PR interviews.

Someone should stand to do at least the basics in terms of being challenged as he has spent the last few months being all things to all people - that has to change in No 10 and really he needs to lay out his stall.

Since he will be a PM who wasn’t elected at the GE he would be wise to stress his intent to use the manifesto and not introduce major change which doesn’t have a mandate (which he has done in some of the soft focus interviews). We may have a parliamentary system but coming in from the outside entirely is different from an elected MP and cabinet minister taking over from the PM. Otherwise come the next election the campaign will be “vote Labour, get an outsider with a different manifesto”.

Re PR, it would need to be a different format to Scotland where you place votes for a party, but the party gives you the candidates they want. Better if you were to know exactly who will be in the parliament. Just look at the Scottish Greens idiots in the SP, there’s one person who apparently doesn’t even have a visa to last the end of his term. And you also just need to look at the mess they made when they were given a bit of power and all the gender self ID stuff.

So many pp here saying Andy has no experience and how easy it is being a Mayor compare to being a PM.
Andy Burnham has been in Politics in one way or another most of his life. Special Advisor, Trade Union and most importantly He has served in Shadow Cabinets and In a Government Cabinet. He knows how Westminster works and he knows the relationships of different roles. Starmer had to learn much of those after he got the job.

He will still have to tell us how he will finance Defence and how to get the economy growing. Those problems are still there and will remain for a long time.

Completely agree with you. I’m quite shocked the pushback and parroting that we are in a parliamentary democracy and this is fine. It’s madness and even if technically allowed, it is insulting the electorates intelligence not to acknowledge how different this is.

I said upthread that rules need to change such that only an mp voted in at the last election should be eligible as at least that would give some connection to the previous GE.

But on balance because we all know that whoever is leader influences GE voting, that a mid term change other than for say death or ill health should happen. Again I know it’s not our system but if the system isn’t working you change it, just like a business would or should.

His intent to run for the leadership has been clear for months

I agree, this is how it has appeared to me, and yet Burnham was still dancing around the issue on Question time a week or so ago. I'd have more respect for him if he'd just answered directly and said "yes, I am going for the top job, for these reasons...".

But he didn't, which makes him appear more slippery and untrustworthy in my humble view.

Maybe Al Carns will take one for the team

That was a councillor, not an MSP I thought?

I don't recognise your description of the AMS system used in Scotland (and Wales). Most candidates are single district candidates so you know exactly who you are voting for. It is only the "additional members" who are added to make things proportional on a party basis - but even then you know who they are going to be before you vote. Candidates are obviously selected by parties, just the same as anywhere else.

Hmm... but he couldn't run until he was an MP and people on this thread have already described him as coming across as smug etc. So it's six of one and half dozen of the other whether he was being slippery to not say he wanted to run vs being arrogant to presume he would win the by-election and hence have a chance of running for leader.

I hold no particular candle for Burnham, though I think he will be a little better than Starmer in some ways - politics is communication and persuasion, to a large extent, and he's probably better at that. But I'm not expecting a step change - the above is about the "business" of being a politician ie what is annoyingly evasive to one voter would be annoyingly smug to another voter if the answer was changed.

I can see that view, however Josh Simons resigned in order to give Burnham a stab at becoming an MP purely in order to go for Prime Minister.

Of course there was no guarantee, but to avoid that question in the way that he did is disingenuous. If Starmer had been doing a stand up job, and the Labour ratings were good, I doubt if Simons would have resigned, and Burnham would happily have gone on being Mayor.

I realise too that there is a fine line between confidence and arrogance, however, honesty would have been quite a good approach. I think he avoided it as he didn't want to appear to be self serving, however that didn't work. Not for me anyway.

About the only thing he has above Starmer is more experience in politics, as evidenced by his ability to answer questions without actually answering the question. Starmer was a quick study though, and got the hang of that pretty quickly.

I think it is a shame that Starmer hasn't been able to leverage the successes they have had, then again, his ability to score an own goal will usually overshadow in the eyes of the critics.

He wouldn’t get the necessary 81 letters of support. Nobody would.

It's shocking that of the 400 plus Labour MPs not one of them was deemed by their peers to have been high enough caliber to be PM. All hail the King of the North.

Andy Burnham gave a smarmy speech when he won Makerfield (the makers of the swamp more likely at this point). In that speech, he talked about CHANGE - so clearly he must have some very clear plan for CHANGE and why has it not been published yet in detail including on Defence, Economic Growth.
He literally deliberately unseated Starmer because Starmer’s change was apparently too slow.
So surely against that, he must be publishing his big Master Plan for Change Immediately?!