By every metric Burnham leads Starmer – politicalbetting.com
By every metric Burnham leads Starmer – politicalbetting.com
There’s enough evidence that the voters see Andy Burnham is a clear improvement on Sir Keir Starmer so I’d expect some of that to translate into an increase in Labour’s share of the vote.
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You can get 27s on Betfair, my logic is that Spain were rubbish against Cape Verde.
The Saudis beat Argentina (the eventual winners) during the last world cup.
Sad
No drugs needed.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/articles/c5yz7wdwgw2o
Possibly 17th July, the last day before the summer recess.
The NATO summit is on 8th July in Ankara and Burnham won't want to attend that with defence fiasco unresolved.
But he may want to attend the EU summit in Brussels on 22nd July to make friends.
(Bit harsh, the players just not there)
£38 or so profit on the £10 original isn’t bad. Have to put down a lot of liability to achieve the gain
It's not harsh to say that he overbowled Jofra Archer, to the detriment of his career.
https://x.com/RobDunsmore/status/2068640122925445252?s=20
It would be unwise to leap to the assumption that the King In The North will now sweep southwards to effortlessly seize the crown jewels of Downing Street.
For his devotees, this was a “proof-of-concept” byelection. Get on with it and put the messiah of Manchester in Downing Street. That will be the siren song of the Burnhamites. [But] Bar superglueing the front door of Number 10, the incumbent has done everything he can to indicate that he will only be dragged out of the building by his fingernails.
Sir Keir has already suggested that, if there is to be a contest for the top job, the battle should not be joined before the people of Greater Manchester have decided who will be their next mayor in the byelection for the vacancy which will now ensue. That can’t be resolved before the very end of July, which is surely one of the reasons for making this suggestion. Sir Keir buys himself more time at Number 10 while increasing the chance that some of the shine will come off his rival as Mr Burnham is subject to elevated scrutiny.
This presents Team Andy with a dilemma. Press on with a near-immediate challenge for Number 10 and his enemies will portray him as a man who is entirely self-centred and too consumed by personal ambition to care what happens to the city he was running five minutes ago.
Camp Burnham would much prefer Sir Keir to agree to set a departure date. It is widely believed that Mr Burnham will urge the prime minister to take this course when they have what will surely be an excruciatingly awkward conversation with each other. Quite a lot of the cabinet favour this way forward. If he continues to spurn that advice, the test...will be whether they are prepared to resign from the government, with all the chaos that would entail, to attempt to bend him to their will. Others in the cabinet fume in opposition to the idea that Mr Burnham should be simply gifted the top job without a proper contest.
[Makerfield voters] have propelled Andy Burnham in the direction of Number 10, but that is not in itself enough to get him over the threshold. What happens next will depend on the feverish calculations made down in Westminster by the most senior politicians in the land.
A few more minutes should be enough!
Peter.
May be time to have no formal Captain just a team of tossers on any given 1st morning
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15916521/amp/Kemi-Farage-split-Makerfield-Burnham.html
It's sensible though - Reform mock Tories who beg for a deal, so they have to reciprocate for dignity's sake.
There’s other options.
Such as let Reform run a minority government or have another election.
So I stick with my forecast that Burnham will become PM on Thursday 17th July, the day before recess.
This allows Burnham to campaign in the Manchester by election as PM with no parliamentary business to distract him. The only date in his diary will be the EU Summit in Brussels on 22nd July.
https://x.com/gerashchenko_en/status/2068618368089731241
https://x.com/grandparoy2/status/2068568433609072928
I wonder what might happen next…?
@williamglenn (Telegraph obvs)
How long will the public continue to like Burnham?
I think there's a decent chance of the tide turning on him as soon as the pre-Budget speculation starts in earnest, probably before the August bank holiday.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Brown
On 11 May 2007, after months of speculation, Brown formally announced his bid for the Labour leadership. He launched his campaign website the same day as formally announcing his bid for leadership, titled "Gordon Brown for Britain".[86] On 16 May, Channel 4 News announced that Andrew MacKinlay had nominated Brown, giving him 308 nominations—enough to avoid a leadership contest. A BBC report states that the decisive nomination was made by Tony Wright with MacKinlay yet to nominate at that point.[87] Brown replaced Blair as Leader of the Labour Party on 24 June 2007.
See Boris driving a JCB through that styrofoam wall in 2019.
How else do you explain the enduring fanaticism for Trump?
An abject failure in Office by objective measures.
Anyhoo- anyone know how Burnham's ratings now compare with Starmer's in 2020 or 2024?
Report:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/06/20/cyclist-arrested-reflecting-pool-denies-trump-vandalism-claims/
To me this looks like normal Trump overreach, and he will run away as soon as challenged on it, as per usual.
Professional swimming pool types are not impressed. This is Swimming Pool Steve. The problem is suggested as being inadequate surface prep, which sounds a very Trumpish thing to do. Like not prepping a floor properly before you tile or paint it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcwqnDUC4-Q
Bonus: here's a Buildhub thread about someone who found an old swimming pool halfway under where he was planning to build his house, and what we all suggested he do with it:
https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/topic/7461-theres-a-swimming-pool-under-my-house/
But I'm not sure even an accurate answer would be a very enlightening one.
Badenoch can not succeed by providing a perfect answer to the question. The measure of her success would be to make the question irrelevant or nonsensical. You might have thought that the Aberdeen South by-election victory would help with that, but clearly she has some way to go.
If I were Burnham, I'd let Starmer have the honour, and focus during July on developing a big impacting plan for my Premiership, to hit the ground running.
Heck it’s a risk I wouldn’t take and our former Tory MP did a very good job and is standing at the next election. Could I vote for him at the moment - nope it’s a risk 2 far in two different ways
1) there is a chance the Tories could let Reform in via scenario 3
2) it’s unlikely that the Tories are the not Reform party around here - Labour is likely to be the better guess
Now with a decent voting system that isn’t a question but it’s FPTP which means pick the least worst candidate the can win rather than your preferred choice
You still have made a choice”
Rush, “Freewill”, 1980, https://www.rush.com/songs/freewill/
Starmer will take matters into his own hands to avoid the challenge by resigning tomorrow and give himself long enough to hit his second anniversary, which Burnham will be OK with as it avoids any unpleasantness, but there's no need for it to take as long Blair/Brown took.
The public want rid of Starmer and I don't think they would be happy about prolonging the agony.
The longer that Burnham spends as a leader-in-waiting the easier it is for his opponents to define him negatively. He needs to become PM so that he can start defining himself more positively with his actions.
Events. The more time passes the greater the chance of some slip between cup and lip. Get it done and get it done quickly.
The idea that Burnham requires at least a month of notice period before becoming PM, because otherwise he doesn't have a clue what he is going to do, is risible. It might be true, but it's no less pathetic. He cannot credibly say, "I urgently need to take over as PM to fix the country, but give be a couple of months to work out how I'm going to do that before I do so."
This is why I repeatedly said that Labour needed to work out what they needed to do differently, before deciding who they needed to implement that. Doing things the other way around isn't going to work.
He's had more executive power available to him, but has he wielded it?
If he had, he might not be in this mess.
..Asked a contractor pal about the $13M paint job peeling off the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
Him: I knew that'd happen.
Me: How?
Him: You can't rush that kind of job. The pool bottom has to be really dry or it'll exude water. And you have to clean it like a mofo first...
https://x.com/CharlesCMann/status/2068491523017110000
And Sandpit is going with Trump's midnight ravings.
In the greater scheme of this administrations crimes and blunders, this is comparatively trivial, but it's also a clear illustration of a movement in denial.
It took six weeks for Gordon Brown to officially take over from Tony Blair because Tony Blair chose not to resign immediately, instead using a pre-announced, seven-week transition timeline to manage an orderly exit.
If Starmer, on Monday, announces a 25 day transition timeline and there are no other candidates, that would do it.
In that context, taking more than a couple of weeks at most to replace him would be ridiculous.
See you next week. Sorry, Wes. Not".
https://labourlist.org/2026/05/labour-leadership-election-rules-keir-starmer-challenger/
I don’t see how the party can get what was a six-week process down to less than four weeks, with the added complication that Starmer has a right be included if he wishes to be, which triggers a full contest expected to take three months.
Also, in that photo, of the guy who supposedly vandalised the pool, if he’d vandalised the pool, he’d’ve had to swim down to the bottom of it rather than being bone dry, as he appears to be there.
Starmer has the right to be included if he wishes to be, but he's not going to be, he's going to accept the inevitable. Whether he wants to, or not, he's not utterly delusional and his time is up.
Such is realty when people like you more.