The Manchester mayor poses a threat to the prime minister; but his fiscal unawareness may be his undoing.
Resentment of Andy Burnham’s popularity once provoked Keir Starmer to tell a rare joke: A Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynite walk into a pub. “Good evening, Mr Burnham,” says the bartender. The prime minister’s barb was aimed at the allegedly chameleon-like politics of the mayor of Greater Manchester, a two-time Labour leadership candidate who thinks he can do a better job than the current incumbent of No. 10.
As this weekend’s Labour party conference threatens to become a proxy war between the two men, the joke is on the PM. Substitute the punchline “Good evening, Mr Starmer,” and we arrive at a closer approximation of the truth.