Burnham’s moment: Labour’s last chance before the crash

The three-way Conservative-Reform-Restore split on the right in Thursday’s by-election made no difference, and Burnham’s victory was a resounding vote of no confidence in the moribund and beleaguered Starmer administration and it’s now only a matter of internal Labour process before Sir Keir takes the short resignation walk with Mrs Starmer to the Whitehall gates and his place in the footnotes of British political history.

The forthcoming change at the top does not, unfortunately, signal a change for the better as the roots of Labour’s calamitous descent from total victory to total collapse in two years lie in an addiction to ruinously high public spending which needs ever increasing taxation and equally crippling borrowing. Starmer’s failure was to fool himself the party had learnt from the Corbyn experiment, but be forced into U-turn after U-turn by the power of left-wing backbenchers whose respect for him turned out to be scant.

Andy Burnham still needs to win the leadership, and how long Starmer clings on remains to be seen, but rebellious left-wingers are unlikely to back an avowedly right-of-centre Wes Streeting or an untested wild card from their own ranks. Burnham will point to his claims of success with Manchester’s publicly-owned buses (with a central government subsidy of reported £226 million this year, and very average satisfaction ratings) as evidence of his Socialism and use that as a foundation of a “New Deal” approach to public services which they will lap up.

But he still needs his own authority and will remember from his time as a minister under Gordon Brown that the PM’s dithering after succeeding Tony Blair in 2007 probably cost Labour a longer spell in government in which the party might have emerged from the banking crash in a stronger position. Retreating from an election did not just deny Gordon Brown a personal mandate − essential for Burnham if he is not to be as much a prisoner of the backbenches as Starmer – but earned him a reputation for at best indecision and cowardice at worst.

If Sir Keir reads the room over the weekend and quits this week, a leadership contest could take the best part of three months and leave just enough time for a snap election at the end of October. Pre-Makerfield, polling put Labour on track to plunge from 412 MPs to just over 80 at the next election, so it will still take courage to go to the public and there will be casualties.

But nothing suggests more economic and financial trouble can be avoided, so a programme of hope before the shine comes off someone with more warmth than Sir Keir on a Mediterranean beach in a parka, is the best chance Labour has for a reset, in the short term anyway. Just as important is the authority he would win to put what will be a very personal election manifesto into practice.

With Reform’s advance now seemingly halted, Burnham might never have a better chance before the wheels start to come off, as they inevitably will, and judging by Douglas Lumsden’s stunning triumph in the Aberdeen South by-election, a Conservative Party revival under Kemi Badenoch is well under way. She is now hitting her straps and even though that has yet to translate into a significant increase in party support, over time it will and she will relish facing Andy Burnham at the Dispatch Box

It’s true the Aberdeen vote was a verdict on the destruction of North Sea oil and gas, for which both Labour and the SNP share responsibility, and it is also the case that the Conservatives threw the kitchen sink at the seat – Ruth Davidson was driving minibuses of activists up from Edinburgh – but unlike previous Tory leaders who were discouraged from campaigning in Scotland, Kemi Badenoch was welcomed with open arms.

It may be arguable that Conservative support in Scotland is now limited to regional fiefdoms, but it has killed off the Reform narrative that a Tory vote is a wasted vote, and every week in Holyrood there is clear evidence that the politics lark is a lot more difficult than Malcolm Offord thought.

Labour was irrelevant in both Aberdeen South and Arbroath & Broughty Ferry and having been one of the first to call for Sir Keir Starmer to quit, Scottish leader Anas Sarwar will also hope for a swift handover in London, even if it makes no difference to his position in Holyrood. But a snap election which reaffirms Labour’s hold on most of the 37 Westminster seats it currently holds would remind the SNP that their high watermark of ten years ago is history. For their part, the Nationalists will be relived that in Arbroath at least, the Peter Murrell embezzlement scandal made no difference.

Just like last month, all the SNP will offer in a general election is the same old schtick about the power to hold an independence referendum, and even under new leadership Labour’s opposition is unlikely to soften. It might be tempting to scoop up wavering SNP voters by including some sort of referendum pledge in a manifesto, but Labour figures point to David Cameron and the Brexit referendum as a very good reason not to.

So what else can the so-called King of the North offer Scotland? He could start by looking at Labour’s pitiful performance in Aberdeen South and give Ed Miliband his drilling orders.