Best Of

Burnham will not be a good PM.

That doesn't answer the questions

1) would he be better than SKS?
2) would he be better at retaining Labour seats than an SKS lead Labour party in the next election?

I suspect the answer to both those questions is that neither would be difficult to achieve...

Starmer is a do-nothing PM, which isn't doing him, Labour, or the country any favours.

Burnham has said very little about what his alternative policy programme for the country is. There's lots of potential for him to be a do-all-the-wrong-things PM, a Labour mini-Truss. It's a lot easier to make things worse than people realise.

Burnham's outburst in the run up to the budget along the lines of "why do we even care about what the bond market thinks anyway" is sufficient to tell you that a Burnham premiership would almost certainly be exceptionally short and painful.

All the evidence is that he's a fully committed believer in the magic money tree, who hasn't yet realised that the party ended in 2008, and we're now well into the hangover.

Truss was at least trying to achieve growth, in the hope that it would start to bring in more tax revenue to offset the losses from her tax cuts - a kind of fiscal version of diving an aircraft as the first step to pull off a loop the loop. We'll never know if she would have made it, as her party saw the ground heading towards them, panicked, threw her out of the cockpit and pulled out of the dive.

Burnham is going to try the dive without any intention off pulling off a loop. He's just hoping that by the time the ground arrives it will be someone else's problem. The problem is that all he'll have round him are people cheerleading for "more nose down now" and "look how fast we're going - isn't it great!".

The reason I name-checked Truss was precisely this sense I get from Burnham that he thinks he can change the rules of the game, but that he doesn't understand what the consequences would be.

I think Polanski has a much better understanding of what the constraints are than Burnham does, and would be less risky with respect to the bond markets.

To be honest I had hoped Burnham was misquoted or at least quoted out of context. Because it is crazy view to have - and I did not think he was that daft. US gets to do what it does because of the Dollar privilege. Everyone else, like James Carville, suggested should be scared of the bond market.

That doesn’t mean to say a state can’t be ambitious or work within the constraints - these funds have to park their money somewhere. There are ways of working with the market to invest in the sort of things left of centre Governments want to do (and indeed do what right of centre governments want to do with regard tax and growth) or at least not scaring the sh!t out of them. But if you cut them out of the conversation they’ll just sit on their hands. A before you know it you are outlasted by a lettuce.

Not so much that, as a default gets priced in. And runaway inflation from money printing is just another way to default.

During the early stages of the Greek Crisis there was an editorial in the Guardian - which took the view that borrowing at the same rate as Germany was a basic (collective) democratic human right. If the people voted for borrowing, they must have their cheap money.

I blame Leon and other sex tourists https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2026/jan/22/bathroom-door-scandal-hotels-putting-toilets-in-glass-boxes

When I was travelling with work I had a collection of photos of outlandish toilet arrangements

A Vietnamese hotel had both a glass walled shower room in the middle of the room and glass toilet cubicle door with telephone in the cubicle
Boutique hotel in B A I snuck into the suite to grab photos of the half-height glass surround en-suite with external urinal

Best hotel room for photos, got booked into the last available room somewhere in Bulgaria, Presidential Suite on the top floor, lounge with real fire, small ship themed balcony with ship's wheel, bathroom with shower, bath and jacuzzi the length of one side of the hotel and absolute priority over the lift ... when I pressed the button it stopped whatever it was doing, came to my floor and didn't stop anywhere else until it got to the floor I selected. I had a lot of fun with that