Andy's chancellor

Plus: The Jimmy Reid School of Party Management

My Times column this week takes on a question I won’t claim to have answered, because only Andy Burnham can. Who’ll be his chancellor? You should, as ever, subscribe to read the piece in full.

Click to read the column

The first thing I should say about this column is that it was written before Shabana Mahmood – who I name alongside Ed Miliband as one of the two leading candidates for No 11 – tried to brief Mike Tapp out of his job as immigration minister, only to be rebuffed by Downing Street. The timing of this little contretemps is less than ideal.

There is no single or settled view on the Treasury question among Burnham’s close supporters but it is fair to say those who were most enthusiastic about Mahmood’s candidacy yesterday are this morning markedly less certain they will get their woman than they were 24 hours ago. But in any case, it will all come down to the next prime minister. We should understand what he wants, not merely who he wants. And that’s what I set out in the column.

The checklist, described to me by someone involved in discussions over the appointment, is roughly as follows:

1. They must be competent enough to do the job, and know their economics.

2. They must be able to impose Burnham’s priorities onto the Treasury, whatever they are: can they deliver meaningful fiscal devolution, speedy and meaningful cost-of-living interventions, etc?

3. They must understand they are there to deliver Burnham’s priorities – not their own. He knows better than anyone that he cannot afford to bake instability into the commanding heights of government with a TB-GBs redux.

4. They must be able to say to Burnham: I know the PLP are telling you they can’t wear this, they’re kicking and screaming, but we can’t do everything. You’ve told me what I should prioritise in order to deliver on your agenda. Here is where we should spend our political capital – and actual capital – with the PLP.

That – yesterday, at least – left Mahmood and Miliband in properly serious contention, though this morning I got a WhatsApp making the case for Pat McFadden: “At least with Pat, you know what you’re buying.” Even before that landed in my inbox I noted that Burnham is enthused by the Milburn review of youth unemployment, but I’m still reluctant to put my fiver on Pat.

That quote, though, speaks to one of the downside risks of a Miliband appointment – which is to say he has his own extensively developed theory of political economy. One of his friends told me earlier this week: “If Ed becomes chancellor it will be the culmination of his entire life’s ambition to remake capitalism itself. That will be quite difficult to control.” Other allies contend – as The Times revealed the other day – that he is developing economic policy for Andy, and so this talk of wish fulfillment is a little overdone.

They make another argument, too: that only Miliband can do the Nixon-goes-to-China thing on welfare reform and adherence to the fiscal rules. As much as we might think the appointment of James Purnell as Burnham’s chief of staff is a fork-in-the-road moment for this embryonic premiership, it’s worth remembering – and I was encouraged to do so by someone who knew both men well in the New Labour years – that Miliband apparently regrets that he did push harder on making work pay at the Cabinet Office in 2007 and 2008, or in the 2010 manifesto he wrote for Brown. Purnell, too, was making a communitarian case for welfare reform in his first couple of years out of the Commons – read the details in my Times profile of the guy here.

Mahmood hasn’t yet spoken to Burnham about the chancellorship. Unlike Miliband, who covets the Treasury, her mind is not entirely settled. Those who know her best – indeed, she’s said this to me herself – know she is motivated by a duty and service and if asked to serve by Burnham she’d be inclined to say yes. But only if she was sure it was to implement an agenda she thought right for the country. She won’t leave the Home Office – or give up custody of immigration reform – lightly. Maybe that’s all a moot point now, but let’s see.

Another thing: North Sea oil and gas. Even as he crowdsurfed into Stubshaw Cross Labour Club in the early hours of last Friday morning it did not escape Burnham’s notice that the Tories – the Tories! – had won in Aberdeen South on a pro-drilling ticket. As I put it in The Times today, he’s not daft: he saw the GMB’s Gary Smith this week, can see which way the winds of Scottish politics are blowing, and he also needs economic growth. Here we might pause to note Miliband’s deceptive flexibility on his own net-zero theology. He has already authorised new drilling under existing licences – fat lot of gratitude it got him from the industry – and may see the approval of the new Jackdaw gas field for domestic consumption as an off-ramp.

Decisions, decisions – all of them likely to elicit some degree of moaning from the PLP. Maybe the biggest test for the new chancellor is temperamental. I open the column with this quote from Edmund Dell, historian of the Treasury and intellectual referee of Labour economics: that not one inhabitant of No 11 “had yet found either the recipe that would transform the performance of the British economy or even, as a lesser and more practical objective, how to manage it without repeated disasters and humiliations”. But it’s another quote from Dell – this one from his speech to the Commons before he joined Roy Jenkins and the pro-Europe rebels in 1972 – that I think gets to the nub of the job Burnham’s chancellor will have to do.

My party says ‘no’, and my judgement says ‘yes’. Can I vote ‘no’ tonight against my judgement on this great issue? I have no alternative but to vote in accordance with my judgement.

They’ll have to make, sustain and win arguments for their judgement – for Burnham’s judgement – on the economy and fiscal policy. And, if necessary, tell the PLP they’re wrong. We can certainly expect some backlash if this response to the column from a serving minister is anything to go by:

Treasury orthodoxy is not Andy’s problem, it’s his solution. The 2nd half of your piece is right

Welfare reform, north sea, tax policies being properly costed rather than implemented with bags of wishful thinking etc. that’s what they need.

So I think it is less “who can get HMT to change” and more “who can do the politics and argument to the left in favour of orthodoxy”

Decisions, decisions. Party management is going to fall to the chancellor as much as it will Burnham or his chief whip. Sir Keir Starmer has spent the week imploring people to make that job as easy as possible. I had sight of his full speech to staff, supporters and MPs in the No 10 rose garden on Monday night, and quoted bits of this peroration in my column:

I will now work through the next few weeks dutifully doing everything I must do for the government, making sure there’s an orderly transition, and I want to make sure that what comes next is a success. I will ensure to do everything I can to make it a success.

We have three more years of this Labour government, hopefully five more years after that, and I want it to go on to be hugely successful, and therefore I will be working here across government and with the candidates to make sure that whoever comes here has the best chance of succeeding and gets off to the very best of starts that they possibly can, and I’ll ask all of you to do that as well.

We’ve done so much for our party already. Please let’s do this next bit. Let’s do it in good spirits.

Then, on Tuesday, he told the cabinet:

I won’t be doing talk radio, I won’t be doing commentary. There won’t be backseat commentary from me.

Lots of people feared Starmer would be stroppy and indignant as he left office but his conduct this week has been a study in magnanimity, however furious, upset and betrayed I’m told he really feels. Whether the 50-or-so loyalist MPs who walked tearily up Downing Street to his living wake want to exercise the same restraint is now the crucial question. Lots of them feel broken and humiliated and hopeless for advancement under Burnham. To them his rise to power has felt a bit like a revenge mission for previously downtrodden factions of the PLP.

Burnham could do worse than show them it isn’t. The best advice on this, I think, comes from Jimmy Reid’s extemporised speech at the beginning of the Upper Clyde shipbuilders work-in of 1971.

There will be no hooliganism, there will be no vandalism, there will be no bevvying, because the world is watching us, and it is our responsibility to conduct ourselves with responsibility, and with dignity, and with maturity.

In other words, pull it all back together – not smash it up. MPs often felt demeaned and ignored under Starmer, which is one of the reasons his premiership ended in the hasty and undignified way it came to pass. A couple of weeks ago Burnham told me he did not want to run the PLP through fear or coercion, nor ignore its cries of pain. He’s said his Catholic faith is about “the innate equality of every single human being, whatever their circumstances” – even, presumably, if they have weird and challenging predilections like Starmerism.

So no hooliganism, no vandalism, no bevvying. If the House of Commons terrace on Monday was anything to go by, that last battle might be lost already. But it could all fall apart very quickly if there’s no sincere gesture towards consensus and inclusivity. I mentioned the need for a Jimmy Reid approach to party management on Monday’s Politics Live. Polly Billington, a Burnham backer, said: “I’m not a football follower. Explain your analogy.” I hope that’s done the job.