The case against…Andy Burnham

By Hopi Sen / @hopisen

A brief series where, for my own amusement (and possibly ensuring I never work for the Labour Party again), I set out the case against each of the Leadership candidates. The eleventh commandment of internal elections is “Never speak ill of a fellow party member”. It gets broken just as regularly as the other ten, but I shall try to be constructive, not merely critical.

Of all the Labour leadership candidates, Andy Burnham could claim to have the most appealing backstory. He’s not the son of a prominent Marxist academic, nor privately educated, nor does he send his children to private school. He isn’t regarded as a factional politician (In either the Blair/Brown or Kinnock/left battles) – but is rather a party loyalist from a working class background who has worked hard and succeeded in politics while staying true to his roots. His love of football is genuine, not faked.

On top of that, Andy Burnham is attractive, talks less like a politican than most MPs, and is has a focus on the needs and interests of working people that leads him to be sceptical of fashionable progressive nostrums.

Nor do I buy that Andy is somehow not “intellectual” enough to be leader. That’s patronising b******ks, quite frankly. He was smart enough to reach the cabinet in his mid thirties, which is good enough for me. You don’t have to have done three years at IPPR to be plenty bright.

And yet, and yet…

First of all Andy’s biggest problem is that he can’t seem to shut up about his biggest asset. Show, don’t tell.

We really didn’t need to know that Andy Burnham keeps waiting for someone to tell him he shouldn’t be an MP. I reckon the rest of the country isn’t that sympathetic about self-image problems among ultra high acheivers.

A leader doesn’t win by telling us how in touch they are with the pulse of the working family of this country, they get points for showing they’ve got their finger on the pulse.

To be fair, Andy has tried to back that up – he’s talked about housing and the need to open up politics and professions away from the connected elites.

But the problem with it is that it too often sounds like an “Andy Burnham deserves it as good as David Miliband” argument. See, for example, this interview with Polly Toynbee, where Andy gets very focussed on the question of doors opening up for others, not for him. I come from a similar background to Andy (State school, Oxbridge, took job after Uni cause I needed money) and even I was wondering if Andy was maybe a bit too focussed on himself there.

It’s a pretty narrow demographic, state school oxbridgers who got free school meals and aren’t Prime Minister. Perhaps that emphasis would change as leader – but there’s another problem.

Does an argument based around being in touch with white working class values really have the breadth needed to win us an election? Surely we need to aim a bit broader than that? Real people aren’t only to be found in Leigh.

Second, how will Andy fight the messaging machine of the Tories and the Lib Dems, who would rapidly try to pitch themselves on the middle england middle ground, and paint Andy as a chippy northerner?

His approach is to define himself as an “aspirational socialist,”, which sounds good, but doubts about how effective he’d be at translating this into campaigning were raised during the election campaign, when the care service agenda was at the heart of a huge fight with the Tories.

Somehow, Andy got trapped in a tussle over whether or not the Tories had signed up to some non-partisan talking shop, while Andrew Lansley ran round the country shouting “DEATH TAX!, DEATH TAX! DEATH TAX!” at the top of his voice.

I hate to admit it, but we lost that campaign battle (even if we may subsequently win the policy war). Does this speak to a lack of message and campaigning skill? The care service plan works well amongst Labour supporters, but Andy didn’t seem able to find a way to sell it to a sceptical public.

So whether it’s a lack of broad appeal or a lack of electoral savvy, there’s a good case that Andy Burnham’s not right (or not ready) to lead. He seems like half a great leader, but something seems… missing.

That said, my heart’s not in this.

Andy Burnham has his flaws as a leader candidate but he’s suffered from a sort of soft bigotry.

The media pay Ed Balls, Ed Miliband and David Miliband the compliment of taking their candidacies seriously. Andy Burnham’s had to fight the whole campaign at a strategic disadvantage – the first thing anyone says is “well he can’t win”.

Fighting against that perception is a huge handicap which defines his whole campaign strategy. You have to fight to even be heard. It seems unduly harsh to then criticise his candidacy in the same terms as candidates who’ve not had to jump through the “you can’t win” hoop.

This charge is unfair. Andy’s at least as strong a candidate as the two Milibands, and he’s been brave on issues like the deficit and the change we need in our political system. He deserves to be taken seriously.

But the charge is also true. With the support of only 33 MPs and no unions, Andy can’t win. Wishing it wasn’t so doesn’t make it any less true.

You get the sense that this is almost a campaign for a right to be taken seriously, for a seat at the top table, for the right not to be ignored in the calculus of the future of the party.

If that’s the case, then Andy Burnham deserves to succeed. He’s won the right to be at the forefront of the Labour movement. His 40 constituency nominations are proof of that. As Brian Clough would say “these are my O-levels, these are my A-levels”.

But for this election, the fundamental problem for Andy Burnham is that he can’t persuade enough people to take him seriously as the next leader.

This may seem like a catch-22, but it isn’t.

To win, he needs to persuade people that he’s more than a boy from Leigh made good. His campaign musn’t be about his backstory, but about our future.

Whatever the obstacles that have been placed in his way, I’m not sure Andy has cleared them – yet.

Hopi Sen also blogs here.