Northern discomfort
Friday Notebook: 17th July 2026
Good morning. I spent the half of this week I wasn’t deluding myself that England were going to win the World Cup much as you’d expect: talking, thinking and writing about what Andy Burnham’s accession to the leadership of the Labour Party later this morning means for everyone else in it, and the country.
To that end I interviewed his old mentor and firm friend, David Blunkett, for tomorrow’s Times. James Purnell has described Burnham as a “Blunkettite”, but the man himself modestly demurs. You’ll be able to find that piece here from Friday afternoon – if you haven’t already, subscribe to read it.
Our conversation in a muggy Lords committee room inevitably turned to immigration. Blunkett drew a very pointed contrast between the politics at play in London and the rest of England. He’s not the only influential Burnham supporter to see things in those terms, and that’s what exactly my column in today’s Times is about.
The core of Burnham’s critique of Labour’s mistakes in government is cultural. As he told me in Ashton a couple of months ago. We were watching the Challenge Cup final and comparing the relative vitality – and popularity – of the Labour Party and rugby league in the seat he’d win a couple of weeks later. “You have to stay connected, or you die,” he said. “The difference between the Labour Party and rugby league is that, although rugby league has its challenges, it’s run by the northern set – and the same can’t be said about the Labour Party.”
Well, the northern set are running the politics of this thing now. And they would say Ed Miliband isn’t becoming chancellor in part because of the cultural divergence Blunkett identified. Initially, the Burnham project looked like it was premised on an alliance between the old industrial left and the new left – or, to put it in modern Westminsterese, Blue Labour and the soft left. The latter is not quite how everyone would see it, but some of those involved in this increasingly unhappy dance certainly do.
Here’s how I explain the view from inside the tent. Or at least one of the tents.
Opponents of a Miliband chancellorship are saying, bluntly, that his political mission and ideological preoccupations are too far removed from the reality of life as lived outside of London.
One often hears this sort of argument and not just about Miliband: that the London left offer policy prescriptions that make little political sense for the small towns of provincial Britain. It’s all about renters in flatshares, they complain, or people who commute to work by train. Net zero, liberalism on immigration, et cetera, et cetera. To all of that, influential members of Labour’s northern set would say: basically nobody cares. “The music that you constantly play,” as the old Smiths record goes, “says nothing to me about my life.”
To quote another, later Morrissey lyric, the contention is that London is “home of the brash, outrageous and free” strain of Labour thinking.
And, yes, I know, this critique levels every possible subtlety and nuance and all the variety of life in a northern town – but it’s the one being made. Indeed, it’s the one that looks to have won the day.
Those who look set to lose out next week are, naturally, very unhappy, as Steve Swinford and my Times colleagues report on our front page this morning. The top line:
Andy Burnham is facing a revolt from his core support on the Labour left over his plans to appoint Shabana Mahmood over Ed Miliband as chancellor amid claims that she lacks an economic vision and is too divisive for the role.
One mournful gag doing the rounds among spads this week was that a government that looks north with Mahmood as chancellor risks doing “McSweeneyism in an Everton top” with the same underwhelming electoral results.
The use of “London” as a pejorative shorthand is also winding people up. It’s worth pointing out, in the interests of fairness if nothing else, that Burnham himself hasn’t really gone in for this. In his first speech as prime minister presumptive he went out of his way to frame his devolution agenda as a remedy for the capital’s “overheated” housing market as well as an overdue correction to regional inequality.
And this morning he’ll sell himself as a Labour leader “for the north and the south, for Scotland, for Wales and Northern Ireland, and for every town and every city in every nation and region of this great country”. But, as I wrote here last week, MPs in London and the southeast are already nervy. A cabinet appointed along the lines Burnham has written into his speech might soothe them a little. Let’s see.
I wonder, though, if this week we hurtled back into a world where ideological debates are the ones that really disrupt the work of Labour government. Some people who started this week thinking they were integral to the Burnham project now believe it has changed shape under false pretences – that words like “culture” are the invisibility cloak swaddling sometime allies who are creeping away from left-wing economics, away from the broad left, and towards what some are calling a possibly unsustainable and probably immoral three-way marriage of old right, Blairite right, and old industrial left.
We shouldn’t be surprised that the last of those groups is finding common cause with critics of the new left on the Labour right. Take a look at this excerpt from LEFT OUT, the book Gabriel Pogrund and I wrote on the fall of Jeremy Corbyn, about the sensationally popular 2019 petition to revoke Article 50 and cancel Brexit without another public vote, and how that was viewed by the most important union men in the Corbyn camp.
In Shadow Cabinet discussions over Brexit, Diane Abbott, Emily Thornberry and Keir Starmer also raised the number of signatures in their own North London seats. Others around the table believed their political horizons, already narrow, had been constrained by Brexit to the point of self-parody. Andrew Murray liked to remind attendees of the Brexit subcommittee that it would take him less than an hour to walk through Corbyn’s, Abbott’s, Thornberry’s and Starmer’s constituencies from his office in Unite HQ. Lavery, meanwhile, had his own axe to grind. ‘Look how many signatures there are in my seat!’ he moaned. The answer, as in so many other Labour redoubts in the north and Midlands, was not very many. At its peak, the number of signatures in Corbyn’s seat was 27,000. In Lavery’s backyard [Ashington, Northumberland], a mere 4,300.
That London again. Back in the present, the quote about McSweeneyism is telling. The widespread hope was that this government would speak to what Starmer aides once called the “hero voters” of the north and midlands as well as the urban precariat in one voice, rather than picking and choosing and delineating on values. As this was all unfolding on Thursday night – or, rather, as the dust was settling – I bumped into someone very close to Nigel Farage. They were delighted by the likely result of the race for the Treasury. In their view this appointment guarantees that Labour’s coalition will remain fragmented, and all the better for Reform UK.
So why is it happening? Really it reveals quite a dramatic disparity in how these different bits of the Labour Party think about class. Members of the embattled group the northern set call the London left argue – accurately, in a Marxist sense – that it’s all about economics and this culture stuff is the really corrosive identity politics.
Then there are those who argue that the intersection of economics with identity and culture is what most people really understand by class these days. They now appear to be winning. The other side think the culture argument is disingenuous.
There’s quite a tart irony in all of this, anyway. Who was it that reintroduced words like class back into Labour’s lexicon in 2010? That was a forbidden word under Tony Blair, of course. In 1999, he said: “The class war is over.” Ed Miliband, now on the wrong side of it, got Labour talking about it in those unselfconscious terms again. I And what thanks he’s getting for it now.
Now listen
We recorded two episodes of our State of It podcast this week, both on this same subject. When we did the first, on Tuesday, we were still only the foothills of this brave new world.
On Thursday we did a turn before an audience of colleagues at Times HQ and set out, among other things, why Team Burnham have alighted on Mahmood – despite her lack of Treasury experience.
Labour Friends of Larkin
I opened that column with an excerpt from Jill, Philip Larkin’s debut novel. He grew to really hate it as he aged, and you can understand why: it’s about a boy who comes to Oxford from the provinces, feels endlessly belittled by his new posho mates but nonetheless can’t help wanting to be them, and falls haplessly and hopelessly in love with an uninterested and unavailable schoolgirl. In later life Larkin thought it painfully juvenile but it’s nonetheless revealing of his undergraduate worldview. After all, it’s fairly obvious who inspired the protagonist.
Burnham loves Larkin, of course. I don’t know whether he’s read Jill – you have to really try to get through the two novels, as I did with this one years and years ago – but the scene in which Lancashire lad John Kemp finds his newly blitzed hometown of Huddlesford mocked by a gaggle of public schoolboys as a “music hall fiction” where nobody could possibly live struck me as a nice distillation of his perspective on north and south.
Speaking of Burnham’s own time at Oxbridge – Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, to be precise – Dan Boffey’s account of the first 45 years of his life in The Guardian is just superb. It’s long, but you’ll end up returning to it more than once – probably the best thing I’ve read on Burnham yet. It notes Burnham’s confession that he suffered “impostor syndrome” at university. But the one thing he took with him once he returned jobless to Culcheth was that love of Larkin. The year he graduated he wrote this letter to The Guardian, which is surely the purest essence of his personality.
Who else would compare Larkin to the Crazy Gang of Plough Lane? There’s one description of what’s happened over the chancellor appointment, by the way – via John Motson. And there it is, the Crazy Gang has beaten the Culture Club!
Other people occasionally wrote poetry into speeches for Starmer – Larkin when the Queen died, Auden at conference in 2021. You never really got the sense they were his choices. Burnham writes his himself – at least for now – so we can surely expect some Larkin or Tony Harrison between now and the next election.
What to read on Widdecombe
I loved this essay on Ann Widdecombe and her understudied legacy by Matthew D’Ancona. It’s shot through with humility, which – I say with what I hope is an ample degree of self-awareness – is all too rare in political commentary.
Those of us that came of age long after she left not only government but the shadow cabinet probably struggled to conceive of Widdecombe as a politician as opposed to a celebrity or opinionated star of light entertainment.
I’m very glad to have read this – and much else of the contemporaenous reporting it made me seek out – because otherwise I would have gone on remembering Widdecombe as a Great British Eccentric. She was more central to Reform than I appreciated too, which I should have realised when I was told more than once by one of Farage’s inner circle of her sceptcial reaction to his pledge to renationalise the steel industry last year.
The most time I’d spent with her before this week was over several viewings of Louis Theroux’s 2002 fly-on-the-wall – filmed during the Tory leadership contest of the previous year. Watch that just the once and, like me, you’ll have committed this verse of Widdecombe’s poetry to heart.
Goodness gracious, what is that?
It’s Mr Pugwash, my black cat.
Goodness gracious, are there others?
Yes indeed, my cat Carruthers.
Anyway, this from D’Ancona seems the crucial point: “She had foreseen the future, a future that people like me on the centre right had not come close to spotting.” You get the sense from both this piece and the Theroux film that she could and would have been the Tory Corbyn had the party’s leadership rules not locked her out of contention in 2001, as explained here.
The point is: Widdecombe had foreseen all this. As Portillo and Maude pursued fiscal prudence, she had warned that the Tories must promise to match Labour spending on health and education in the 2001 election, and steer clear of the weeds of economic jargon. “I will tell you this, Francis [Maude],” she said, “down at the Pig and Whistle they do not talk about aggregate expenditure levels.”
Five years before Nigel Farage became UKIP leader, she was already designing the political software that he and his followers would use to win the referendum and to mount their high-octane campaign for power after the 2024 general election.
On the run-down Arden estate in Hackney in June 2001, as she announced her withdrawal from the Tory leadership contest, she had explicitly identified the new electoral demographic that would eventually dominate political discourse, calling them “the Forgotten Decent.”
As she put it: “They are people like us but with only a fraction of our resources and all they want to do is live normally but instead their lives are made a daily hell by drugs, thuggery, intimidation and degradation of the environment.”
Then again, even her reinvention as a celebrity was a political act.
She understood, too, that the partition between politics and entertainment was collapsing. Plenty of people in Westminster sneered when she took part in the first season of ITV’s Celebrity Fit Club in 2002 – that’s 21 years before Farage turned I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, in which he finished third, into a relaunch of his political ambitions.
The sneering continued when she appeared on Strictly Come Dancing and, with Anton Du Beke as her partner, in 2010, lasting until the tenth week; but, as she said to me on more than one occasion, “if certain people sneer at you, you know you’re winning.” In 2018, she finished second on Celebrity Big Brother.
This, too, seems bang on. Just look at what Kemi Badenoch has been saying this week about the ECHR and net zero.
The modernising position that I once espoused simply doesn’t exist any more. In the battle for the soul of the right, she lost the battle but definitely won the war…
…the populist politics of which Ann Widdecombe was a principal architect has been nourished by performative wokery and seen off both the centre right and technocratic Labour. Burnham is, to borrow Lincoln’s words, the last best hope.
I said to a couple of Labour people this week that “the forgotten decent” is a lovely, prescient bit of phrasemaking. It’s telling, I think, that even David Cameron used it in a 2007 Guardian piece.
These are the people Ann Widdecombe once memorably called "the forgotten decent" - trapped in deprivation through no immediate fault of their own, unable to climb into the middle classes because of a series of barriers that completely block the route.
Doesn’t that sum everything up? A modernising Tory leader quoting Ann Widdecombe, seemingly safe in the knowledge she’d been defeated forever, in The Guardian. I wonder what today’s equivalent of that would be.
Watch this
The algorithm served me this clip of Jude Bellingham’s grandad knocking his specialist subject – the history of Nigeria from 1900 to 1966 – straight out of the park on a 1987 episode of Mastermind. This wasn’t even 40 years ago yet everything about it seems almost Victorian. A bloke calling themselves a “schoolmaster”? Studying the history of Nigeria as a hobby? We won’t see his like again, and more’s the pity. James Marriott could do worse than run this video as an advert for his book on the post-literate society.
Worth clicking
Gawain Towler on the kindness of Ann Widdecombe
William Davies on the real meaning of Andy Burnham’s anti-politics
Michael Gove makes the case against blanket security for MPs
George Osborne and Ed Balls on the same subject – and the case for Miliband
Geri Scott, Matt Dathan and Constance Kampfner on what to expect from Shabana Mahmood in the Treasury
A great Times obit of the guy that revived Consett with Phileas Fogg crisps
I’ll be back here with more on Blunkett, Burnham and Labour’s new era early next week. Thanks for reading.
Thank you very much, Patrick. Much appreciated
1987 was nearly 40 years ago!