The Irish have a tradition called the ‘month’s mind’ where relatives attend Mass to remember a loved one four weeks after their demise. Give or take a couple of days, its a month since Keir Starmer resigned as prime minister, although, frankly, it could be two years.
His passing as PM feels total. Gone. Forgotten. Disavowed. There is nothing even close to mourning. The Burnham Premiership is Year One. The past 24 months in office are reduced to junk status. Is that fair? Probably not. Keir Starmer wasn’t that bad, however his central fault – non-existent political antennae – combined with a lumpy, awkward public persona – means he will also be the last introvert to serve as PM.
The King is dead, Long Live the King of the North, so to speak. Yet Labour’s fundamental problem remains: How to govern when there’s no money to change anything? On any metric, Labour is light years from making the transformational change promised back in 2024. Andy Burnham has not learned how to turn lead into gold, merely brought greater flair and guile to proceedings.
Take housing. Despite promising to build 1.5 million new homes by 2029 (a pathetically inadequate figure to begin with) the final figure for 2025 was just 115,350 – 18,261 fewer than the Tories managed in 2023. With higher taxes in the offing and with the spectre of a sovereign debt crisis stalking the public finances, Labour is left treading water; hoping it can market small, incremental improvements as evidence of its worthiness to govern.
Buying people ‘breathing space’ is how Burnham is framing these gestures. Capping bus fares and making subscriptions easier to cancel – helping ease the cost of living crisis – is decent politics, but measly policy. Paradoxically, it is Burnham hoping for breathing space.
He needs to see growth in the economy as desperately as his predecessor did. His ‘micro-radicalism’ is the antithesis of ‘transformational change’ – but its all Labour has in the cupboard, for now. As the long, lazy summer of 2026 begins to drift into autumn and normal political service resumes, the question is whether this is going to be enough.
