Marina Force

As soon as I heard the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood tell the BBC say how much she likes and admires the Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, I concluded that he is toast. She will chair the special ten-person NEC committee meeting at 11 today that will decide whether Burnham can stand in the Gorton and Denton by election. And although as chair, she probably won’t even vote, she knows which way the wind is blowing - and it is in the direction of keeping him out of parliament, at least till Starmer is no longer PM, for which she will not wish to be blamed. There are good and bad reasons why the Starmer loyalists on the committee will block Burnham. The bad ones are that Burnham and Starmer have a terrible personal relationship. They don’t like each other. Just one manifestation is that Burnham and Starmer have not spoken about his ambition to return to parliament, even though Burnham’s letter announcing his desire to do so speaks of letting the PM know - through intermediaries, it turns out - that he would be loyal to him. The better reasons, say Labour sources, are 1) There is a risk that the by-election to find a new mayor of Greater Manchester could be won by Reform after a toxic campaign, at a cost of £5m to the taxpayer and several hundred thousand pounds to the Labour Party. 2) For all his protestations of loyalty to Starmer, Burnham’s return to parliament would see the return of that long running psycho-dramatic soap opera that we watched with jaws dropped during the years of Tory government. Rational state governance was made almost impossible by the leadership ambitions of former ministers. In this re-make, Starmer would be Theresa May and Burnham would be Boris Johnson. 3) Investors in UK government bonds would have a field day, buying and selling government debt, forcing interest rates higher and lower, depending on whether left or right were in the ascendant, in a leadership contest that would begin informally the moment Burnham was sworn in. All that at least is the Starmer-vanguardist case for sending Burnham back to his Manchester citadel. It’s not without rationale, not least that the default position in Labour’s rules is that mayors don’t stand for parliament until their terms are up. There are however strong counter arguments, even for those who say they have Starmer’s interests at heart. More than anything else, repulsing Burnham would be seen - obviously and correctly - as a manifestation that Starmer is not secure in his job. To state the obvious, weakness in a PM is directly correlated with his or her openness to intellectual challenge from within the party fold. The PM would be explicitly rejecting that debate. Welcoming Burnham back to Westminster would show Starmer’s self confidence. Rejecting him is the diametric opposite. However it would be a battle won by Starmer though a war still very much in balance. Because what is likely to happen today would shore the PM up in the short term while turning left-right and personality-driven factionalism from rumbling illness into an acute Labour disease. So if I am right and Burnham is rebuffed, that may lower the temperature a little on such factional scheming to replace him till after the May elections. But it is inevitable that the self-styled King of the North would return to his Mancunian fortress as a symbol of Labour’s divisions. And if the party is humiliated in Wales, Scotland and the locals, those divisions would become a yawning chasm that could devour Starmer.