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Maybe Andy Burnham is the figure that can finally unite the country. He deserves a chance at that.

Since when did we expect it to be the job of politicians to unite people rather than to govern effectively?

Churchill?

Degrees of uniting people. There's the "All behind you, Winston" of the David Low cartoon. Wartime Churchill probably was the last PM to manage that, and that's probably for the best... You need wartime for that degree of unity to work.

What's more alarming is the lack of "loyal opposition to an acknowledged PM" thing. One of the questions Starmer has never successfully answered is how to respond to the "you're not my REAL PM" from the Kevins to his left and right. Then again, neither did Sunak or May. Truss didn't have time to be asked that. Johnson could initially point to his huge majority, but that effect didn't last. And then we're back to Cameron.

Looking forward, it's pretty easy to see how the strange structure of Burnham's mandate would come back to bite him if things turn sour.

You could say that's a character failure of their leadership. Fair enough, but it's not obvious who the better-but-cruelly-denied Prime Ministers We Never Had were. Some of what we've seen is also a failure of followership, I suspect because society has atomised. And that's going to be much harder to fix.

Not sure that everyone was behind Churchill. He lost a landslide election when the war was still underway against Japan, and there was a VONC in 1942 concerning Churchill's conduct of the war.

Over recent years we have had such turnover of MPs from purges and one landslide then another that few MPs have deep roots in Parliament and how to conduct themselves. It is part of the explanation why we are shortly onto our 7th PM in a decade. It seems we are more like the Italians than they are themselves now.

Maybe Andy Burnham is the figure that can finally unite the country. He deserves a chance at that.

Since when did we expect it to be the job of politicians to unite people rather than to govern effectively?

Churchill?

Degrees of uniting people. There's the "All behind you, Winston" of the David Low cartoon. Wartime Churchill probably was the last PM to manage that, and that's probably for the best... You need wartime for that degree of unity to work.

What's more alarming is the lack of "loyal opposition to an acknowledged PM" thing. One of the questions Starmer has never successfully answered is how to respond to the "you're not my REAL PM" from the Kevins to his left and right. Then again, neither did Sunak or May. Truss didn't have time to be asked that. Johnson could initially point to his huge majority, but that effect didn't last. And then we're back to Cameron.

Looking forward, it's pretty easy to see how the strange structure of Burnham's mandate would come back to bite him if things turn sour.

You could say that's a character failure of their leadership. Fair enough, but it's not obvious who the better-but-cruelly-denied Prime Ministers We Never Had were. Some of what we've seen is also a failure of followership, I suspect because society has atomised. And that's going to be much harder to fix.

Maybe Andy Burnham is the figure that can finally unite the country. He deserves a chance at that.

He might unite many liberals and the left behind him, Reform and increasingly Tory voters though are not fans of Burnham

You're seeing things through the ideological lens of someone interested in and who follows politics. Freedman circulated some research from the politics professor at Nuffield, Oxford yesterday that made the point that a lot of voters simply want what they termed 'valence' - " the non-ideological things that matter to practically everyone, regardless of which ideological ‘bloc’ they belong to: competence, delivery, commitment to people’s primary concerns" - and that these issues can override more ideological issues for many of them. They suggest " the British electorate has been primarily punishing the two largest parties on the issues of competence, or failures in competence, and for the primary issue of the cost of living, and feelings of economic insecurity", and that this underpins much of the support for Reform and the Greens.

Whether or not Burnham can address and deliver those things is another question entirely - as the professor goes on to set out in the rest of her piece - but it's not as simple as saying that Reform and Tory voters "are not fans of Burnham". Not least because, very clearly, many Makerfield voters who backed Reform in local elections last month just voted for Burnham this month.

Many one nation centre Tory's would find Burnham far more palatable than Starmer and would find him far more palatable in non Tory of Labour v Reform seats than a Tory Party desperately trying to mimic Farage on the increasingly less real problem of immifgration and illegal migration and denial of Climate Change.

Burnham now is in clearly net negative territory with 2024 Tory voters as he increasingly pushes a tax and spend agenda that is left of Starmer.

Maybe Andy Burnham is the figure that can finally unite the country. He deserves a chance at that.

He might unite many liberals and the left behind him, Reform and increasingly Tory voters though are not fans of Burnham

You're seeing things through the ideological lens of someone interested in and who follows politics. Freedman circulated some research from the politics professor at Nuffield, Oxford yesterday that made the point that a lot of voters simply want what they termed 'valence' - " the non-ideological things that matter to practically everyone, regardless of which ideological ‘bloc’ they belong to: competence, delivery, commitment to people’s primary concerns" - and that these issues can override more ideological issues for many of them. They suggest " the British electorate has been primarily punishing the two largest parties on the issues of competence, or failures in competence, and for the primary issue of the cost of living, and feelings of economic insecurity", and that this underpins much of the support for Reform and the Greens.

Whether or not Burnham can address and deliver those things is another question entirely - as the professor goes on to set out in the rest of her piece - but it's not as simple as saying that Reform and Tory voters "are not fans of Burnham". Not least because, very clearly, many Makerfield voters who backed Reform in local elections last month just voted for Burnham this month.

Yes. This captures so much that is true. What counts is competence in the hard task of the state agencies running competently right now everything (that's a lot) they have undertaken to run, or be accountable for. Ultimately, for good or ill, that's nearly everything. Government has made massive rods for its own back by taking everything to itself. Its job is more or less impossible.

Many intangibles are more or less meaningless. But some mean a lot. Neither Burnham nor anyone else can do competently and rapidly everything government pretends to, though they could do better. Beyond the valence of competence they can deal in leadership and being very obviously good at things.

Most people live boringly OK decent lives with varying but OK levels of peace and prosperity. I am surrounded by them. I am one of them. This despite the unrelenting gloom of media and politics, all saying your glass is half empty and getting emptier. The rewards go to the leadership that can tell you your glass is half full and getting fuller. For this Burnham, or whoever, needs to tell a complaining nation plausibly where we are going and how we are going to get there.

Politics and its allied media have more or less stopped even trying, and its time someone did. This last is Starmer's greatest fail.

You miss the point that the government is accountable at the ballot box for the quality of people's lives, not just those parts run by state-owned enterprises. Everything could be privatised tomorrow and we could still vote the government out if petrol goes up because some damn fool has set fire to the Middle East. Labour knows this, or should do, because it was private sector shops closing in left-behind towns that triggered the collapse of the red wall, and the Conservatives know it too because of those nasty private-sector bankers taking against Liz Truss.