Far from being another ‘dud’, Burnham could be the longest-serving prime minister since Blair

Is Andy Burnham another “dud” prime minister?

Andrew Neil certainly seems to think so. The former editor of The Sunday Times, BBC presenter, GN News founder and now Daily Mail columnist writes: “Something is rotten in the British body politic. It has lumbered us with a series of leaders who were not prime ministerial timber.”

According to Neil, “the rot started with Theresa May”, who was “useless”. It continued with Johnson, “who did get Brexit done, then proceeded to do what he’s always done – let down anyone who puts their faith in him. He should never have been prime minister”.

Truss “should never have been allowed near the job”. Sunak is “a decent man who got the job too late to make a difference”, but we will “never know” if he “might have made more of a fist of it in better circumstances”. And Starmer was “a robotic lawyer without an ounce of political acumen or strategic vision – another plonker who should never have been prime minister”.

Now we have “Bumbling Burnham”, and Neil lists some of the mistakes he has made in his first three months in office. He accepts that Burnham’s words in parliament that risked prejudicing the trial of Ann Widdecombe’s alleged murderer were quickly corrected and will soon be forgotten, but says that they are part of a pattern of loose talk that frequently has to be corrected or qualified.

Burnham’s implied backing for Manchester City and its owners, the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, “reminded people that his long tenure as mayor of Greater Manchester, far from being municipal socialism at its finest, was actually crony capitalism at its worst”.

Nor does Neil approve of damaging British-Israeli relations by imposing sanctions on West Bank settlers. Or of “raking up” the Brexit issue again by opening up the prospect of rejoining the EU and suggesting that the referendum result was illegitimate because Russia had interfered – a suggestion from which Burnham quickly retreated.

Meanwhile he complains that Burnham has postponed tough decisions on social care, defence spending and a third runway for Heathrow.

Set out like that, I have to say that the charge sheet against the prime minister seems rather thin. He has a chronic tendency to say things that have to be adjusted later. “Adjust” was my favourite word in Burnham’s Labour Party conference speech. He said of the triple lock that it would take the state pension to a record high value in April 2030, and from there, “we will adjust it”.

Neil calls him Bumbling Burnham, but he could just as well be called the Adjustable Prime Minister, and his flexibility could well be, on the model of Harold Wilson, the key to a long period in office.

I disagree with Andy Burnham because he has deviated by more than a millimetre from the path of Blairite truth – but I do think he is likely to continue to be prime minister after the next election, which I expect will be in 2028 or 2029.

Burnham is an anti-Blairite in his class politics, his statism and much of his foreign policy. And yet there is something of New Labour in his approach to electoral coalition-building. The way he has appealed at the same time to voters who had defected to the Greens and to Reform has a touch of the early Blair about it.

My assumption is that we are at the point in the flight path when we are about to feel the plane starting to descend. The Budget in 11 days’ time will be a moment when hard choices cannot be avoided and some voters are going to feel disappointed.

Burnham has hit one such moment in his short premiership to date, which gives us clues as to how he will handle the crunch. When it looked as if two of the killers of PC Andrew Harper were going to be let out of prison early, Burnham fussed and dithered and adopted three different positions in quick succession, each one branded as the most that he could do given the impossible choices he inherited. But in the end he and Alex Norris, the justice secretary, avoided the catastrophic outcome in the court of public opinion – PC Harper’s killers stayed behind bars.

Burnham and John Healey, the chancellor, will therefore bumble and adjust and tinker and worry, and they will probably succeed in minimising the political damage done by a minorly tax-raising Budget.

As a Blairite, I cannot stand the anti-market economic illiteracy of “greater public control”, “reindustrialisation” and “Buy British”, but they are all superficially popular and will help to conceal the government’s failure to restrain the growth of public spending.

Even so, slogans, optimism and better Tik Tok videos cannot sustain the Burnham bounce in the opinion polls for ever. The prime minister and the government are probably going to become more unpopular over the next two years. Hence the persistent speculation about an early election, and hence, too, Neil’s speculation that Burnham may add to the high turnover in No 10.

Which is all plausible until you look at the alternative. Neil ends his article by recording his “growing feeling that Kemi Badenoch is in a leadership league of her own”. But even if she were the greatest, she leads a basket-case party, which currently has less than half of the support of the right wing of the electorate.

Burnham should be well-placed at the next election to benefit from anti-Reform tactical voting. Assuming, that is, that he does not become as hated as Starmer was – and I may not be the best judge of the likelihood of that because I could never understand why the feeling against Starmer was so strong.

He may well need the support of the Liberal Democrats and others to do so, although it is pointless to be too precise about such predictions. But if he does stay on as prime minister, he has a chance of serving for at least seven or eight years, which would be longer than any of Gordon Brown (three), David Cameron (six), Theresa May (three), Boris Johnson (three), Liz Truss (49 days), Rishi Sunak (two years) and Keir Starmer (two).

And Burnham has three great advantages: political instinct, flexibility and a divided opposition. Which means that, far from being a “dud”, he is quite likely to be the longest-serving prime minister since Blair.