Andy Burnham must learn lessons from Keir Starmer's failure to 'prepare' for Downing Street

In the end, the then Conservative government managed to waddle along for nine months, before an election which, as everyone knew he would, Rishi Sunak lost, largely because of the calamitous performances of his predecessors, Liz Truss and Boris Johnson.

The obvious consequence of Tory defeat was Labour victory. Yet this apparently came as something of a surprise to Keir Starmer and co, with the Prime Minister’s former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, claiming Labour “didn’t prepare enough for what kind of world we were going to be in”.

READ MORE: Andy Burnham: Here is my pitch to Scotland

“We are now in a very different era than when Labour was last in government, and I think we didn’t have enough conversations at the top of the party about what that meant, how to prepare for it, what that meant for the state, how the state needed to be reformed, because in lots of ways the state is really out of shape and is unable to deliver for people,” McSweeney told the BBC’s Political Thinking with Nick Robinson podcast.

“You have to deliver quite quickly for people for them to see the change quickly, and I think we didn’t come in with enough of a theory about how we would do that, and why that was important.”

A new start

No wonder people complain that it can be hard to work out what Starmer stands for. However, after two years of drift, bad decisions and U-turns, Labour now has a chance to reset and go again under Andy Burnham.

A decent speech on Monday suggested he might have the kind of political flair to help a troubled nation rediscover its self-confidence. But he now needs to back that up with bold action and good decisions to, first and foremost, get the economy going in the right direction.

Burnham has much less time than Starmer to prepare, so he will have to use it particularly wisely if he’s to have any hope of finally turning our ugly duckling government into a swan.