CSM EDITORIAL
Sir Jim Ratcliffe cannot run a football club. Manchester United have been a shambles under his stewardship, and no amount of petrochemical billions has bought him a clue about how to pick a manager or a sporting director. On that, the whole country is agreed.
But on Britain, he is not wrong.
Ratcliffe says the country is “on the slide.” He says high taxes and high immigration are driving wealth out. He says refusing to develop our own North Sea gas while importing the stuff from elsewhere is “insanity.” He says nobody in politics is tough enough to deal with immigration or the benefits bill. And then he did the most British thing imaginable: he left, taking his tax residency to Monaco, where he can watch the decline from a comfortable distance.
The standard response is to sneer. Billionaire lectures country from tax haven. Fine. But the sneer is not an argument. Ratcliffe is a man who built something from nothing, which is more than can be said for the current occupant of Downing Street.
Which brings us to Andy Burnham.
The video above is a short clip of a wee Indian fellow being told to attempt a Michael Jackson-style dance move and messing it up. Think of Burnham as that man. He is a figure handed a script he cannot perform, in a role for which he is fundamentally unsuited, and the result is a kind of tragicomedy. He is not malevolent; he is merely out of his depth, a provincial politician playing at statecraft on a stage that demands a heavyweight. The stage is flawed. Burnham cannot help but lose his feet.
Our Prime Minister, on a visit to Kyiv, is handed a guitar by Ukrainian soldiers. He plays the riff from a Smiths song. He jokes that he is out of practice. He is. The soldiers sing him Oasis. Everyone smiles for the camera. Here, we are told, is a leader who connects with ordinary people. What it actually is, is a man who has spent his entire adult life in the machinery of Labour politics, being filmed doing a party trick while his country slides toward a fiscal cliff. The guitar is a metaphor. The troops are a metaphor. The whole thing is a metaphor for a government that has mastered the art of looking like it is doing something, while doing nothing that matters. It is the politics of the campfire sing-along, performed on the deck of the Titanic.
Now watch the man in the video get put off by his groping colleague. Think of the unions asking for welfare increases and pay increments for already wealthy tube drivers. Think of backbenchers seeing their polling numbers.
The performance is not the point; the performance is a distraction from the demands of the vested interests who own the stage.
Burnham is an unelected prime minister. He is a socialist—yes, he is that naïve and impractical. He did not win a general election. He did not win a leadership contest. He was parachuted into the top job by the internal mechanics of a party that has run out of ideas and run out of talent, and he now governs a country that never voted for him. This is not a technicality. It is the central, defining fact of his premiership. Every decision he makes is shadowed by the knowledge that he has no personal mandate, no fresh programme, no convincing answer to the question: who actually chose you?
And so he governs by vibe. He visits Ukraine. He plays the guitar. He talks about being “pragmatic” on oil and gas while delaying the decisions that would actually keep the lights on. He is advised to seem like a nice fellow, and he complies, because seeming like a nice fellow is the only card he has. It is the politics of the nice man in a crisis, a man whose only qualification is that he is not the other guy.
It will not last. These sideshows never do. Even the Lib Dems are running scared of a shotgun election and the proposed Lib-Lab coalition.
So, why did Labour call for Burnham?
Look at the alternatives.
Look at the cabinet.
Look at the benches.
This is a party that has spent a decade purging anyone with an actual career, an actual conviction, or an actual record of running something. What remains is a collection of advisers, spinners, and careerists who have never met a payroll, never shipped a product, never balanced a budget outside the cosy confines of a think tank, a BBC green room, or a council press office. You do not call for a man like Burnham unless you have nothing better. He is not the solution. He is the last available option.
Serious commentators are now openly predicting a 1976 moment. The comparison is not casual. In 1976, Britain ran out of other people’s money. The IMF had to be called in. A Labour government had to accept terms dictated by creditors. The illusion of British solvency collapsed in a matter of months. Today, the bond markets are watching. Sterling is twitchy. The fiscal position is worse than it looks. The commitments are larger than anyone will admit. And the man in charge is playing guitar for the troops in a country that is not ours, fighting a war that is not ours, while the real war—the one over whether Britain can still pay its own way—goes unfought.
A 1976 moment requires talent to survive. It requires a cabinet of individuals who have had distinguished careers outside politics, people who have run things, who understand how money works, who can stand up to the vested interests and make the cuts that must be made. It requires brutal welfare reform. It requires a serious energy policy. It requires grown-ups. It does not require a student union president with a guitar.
The days of these student union governments are gone. The country cannot afford them. The bond market will not tolerate them. The public, eventually, will not forgive them.
Burnham will be the last of them. He is the final expression of a political culture that confused activism with governance, that mistook performance for achievement, that believed the right tone and the right photo-op could substitute for the hard, dull, unglamorous work of actually running a country. He is a placeholder, a caretaker for a nation in foreclosure, destined to be remembered not as a prime minister, but as an interlude: the last man standing before the music stopped.
Inevitably, he will slip up.
Maybe, like his Spanish socialist counterpart, he will have the good sense to realise that the silly, spendthrift games of the Left across Europe are up, and will call a general election.
Or, like the wee Indian, Burnham will plunge embarrassingly to the bottom of an empty (voter) pool.