Andy Burnham is at home at Labour conference, and not only because it is in Liverpool and he has Merseyside roots. The prime minister is native to his political tribe wherever it gathers. He is fluent in its sentimental vocabulary and indigenous to its folk traditions.
Keir Starmer had solid Labour bona fides. He joined the party as a teenager. His parents named him after Keir Hardie.
But he didn’t have Burnham’s knack for turning those red-team credentials into an emotional connection. Starmer liked to remind Labour that it had been unelectable when he took over and that the changes he enforced brought victory for the first time in a generation. But there’s a limit to the gratitude available to a leader who tells party members that their ideological instincts are the enemy of success.
Tony Blair managed it for a decade because he kept winning. Starmer blew his credit almost immediately because he turned out not to have any instincts at all, or none that could set a coherent direction in government. No one says that of Burnham.
In the buildup to conference, ministers found it unnerving to have a leader who mused aloud on all kinds of things that might or might not be official policy, allowing beer back on to football terraces, for example, or a national care service free at the point of use. But mostly it is refreshing to have a prime minister with clear priorities and a gift for narrating them, who tells a story about the country Britain could be and why only Labour could make it that way. It is energising for the party to be told they do not have to sneak up on power; that victory might be achieved without the submersion of ideological impulse.
In the preamble to his speech in Liverpool, Burnham warned of discomforting candour to follow. Most of what he then said came as a blessed relief to the faithful. It was an argument for social democracy rooted in the view that Britain took a disastrous wrong turn in the 1980s; that the ideological impetus of Thatcherism was socially atomising and economically disempowering.
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