spiked92%
Andy Burnham is stuck in the 1990s 81%
By Gareth Roberts0%
7/21/2026, 10:39:26 AM
Topics: Long Reads
Keywords: Andy Burnham, Labour Party
BS Summary: This article contains 21 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Ad Hominem, and Hasty Generalization, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 40.1% saturation with 760 hits. Analysis detected 3,203 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,897 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 73.5% and a BS Rank of 81% (3,724 of 19,233 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 80.60% of the article peer group.
Andy Burnham was born in January 1970, in the Liverpool suburb of Aintree (famed for its racecourse and its iron).
His dad was a telephone engineer, his mother a GP’s receptionist.
It is my regrettable but inevitable duty to have to inform you that he joined the Labour Party when he was 15 years old.
He has a Roman Catholic background, but then this shouldn’t really surprise us, as so much of progressivism is homily and responses – it requires no thought at all.
A lot has been written about Burnham lately, and he has certainly talked at great length, but very little information has been imparted.
He is like a book that you’ve forgotten you’ve read.
You recall the cover, the sensation of turning the pages, but nothing about the story.
As you will know, the new UK PM appears to be a very ordinary man, and in fact almost painfully well-adjusted in his demeanour.
Ordinariness should be a virtue in a prime minister, particularly after the run of freaks and geeks we’ve had over the past decade.
But it is not.
And actually, he is stranger than we think – not in himself, no, but in the aura he creates and its curious effect on others.
He is a very weak flavour of a man, which makes his elevation to saviour by Labour MPs all the more depressingly baffling.
It’s like being tied up awaiting a terrible fate when the door bursts open and you cry, ‘Thank heavens, it’s Superman!’, when in fact it’s the bassist from the Inspiral Carpets.
Labour MPs seem to rate his modestly impressive achievements as mayor of Manchester rather higher than they deserve.
When Keir Starmer came to power, even though I was certain it would mean disaster and would end pretty much the way that it has (though sooner than I anticipated), I kept schtum.
I couldn’t help doubting myself.
Maybe I’ve judged this wrong, I thought.
Remember, at the dawn of Starmer, all those articles by folk supposedly in the know about those ruthlessly efficient, pragmatic political masterminds Morgan McSweeney and Sue Gray?
Reading those, I pondered that perhaps I’d overlooked something.
And it would be a mistake to underestimate the intelligence and acumen of your political opponents, wouldn’t it?
But this fair-mindedness has now become far harder to sustain.
It is very difficult to compose a thought along the lines of ‘Perhaps the mighty brains of Lucy Powell and Chris Bryant know something I don’t?’.
I find that there are limits of Pollyanna-ishness which I cannot cross.
This time round, I feel so confident in my prediction that I’m going to put it on paper.
Here it is: Andy Burnham will be a disaster.
He cannot succeed because he is totally out of step with reality.
Even with the most favourable prevailing political conditions, he would fail.
And the prevailing conditions are awful.
*Andy Burnham* as the answer to Britain’s problems?
He is comically unequal to the task.
The solutions he is unveiling as I write – there should be more mayors, we must have a second No10 in Levenshulme, there’s been too much Thatcherism! – are risibly out of touch.
It is like somebody presenting at an emergency room, projecting blood and vomit from every orifice, and being sent away with a couple of Nurofen.
But before we get on to that Burnham policy agenda, let’s examine the tone of its delivery.
Apparently, the feeling in Labour is that Starmer was far too doomy and gloomy at the kick-off back in 2024, what with Rachel Reeves circling overhead cawing like a constipated crow.
So, in the time-honoured political tradition of overcompensating for a predecessor, Andy is going to be breezy, bright and light.
He has a low bar to clear – to be less annoying than Keir Starmer.
Unfortunately, Andy is just as annoying, but in a different way.
Starmer makes one want to vomit.
The Burnham aesthetic brings on more of a dry heave.
He is reminiscent of Chorlton from *Chorlton and the Wheelies,* but without Chorlton’s innocence.
Worse, he has obviously started to believe in his own myth, peacocking and preening and taking everybody and everything for granted.
We’ve had much evidence of self-adoration in the three weeks of his run-up.
Excruciating social-media content has abounded.
Scrutiny from journalists, even friendly ones, would be far too much of a downer.
Instead, Andy has popped up on Reddit for an ‘Ask Me Anything’, in which he answered only the questions he liked the sound of.
He ran away from journos after his one public speech of this little interval, but agreed to be grilled by… Gary Lineker.
And he chatted on the street to the people of Cardiff, the poor sods.
Haven’t they suffered enough?
He described this stunt as evidence of him ‘doing politics differently’, as if speaking to members of the public was a spiffing new idea nobody had ever previously considered.
I suspect that people don’t care how politics is done, as long as it is done competently.
This obsession with tone is a sure sign that there is no actual content.
When the accusation of not being ‘serious’ is made against politicians, I flinch a bit.
Neither seriousness nor its lack intrinsically counts for very much.
If the person concerned has an easy, affable manner or if they are a crabby, snappy downer, what does it matter?
The only important consideration is that they perform effectively and display good judgement.
Starmer, like Boris, Truss and Rishi, was dumped not because of his demeanour – though obviously it didn’t help – but because he kept making really bad decisions.
The public is remarkably tolerant of weird and unpleasant politicians who govern wisely, though it’s been a long time since that was tested.
The current Andy vibes – big head swelling, big mouth running on – are inappropriate, yes.
But they wouldn’t be a problem if his worldview were closer to reality.
Which brings us back to Andy’s policy platform, such as we know it.
Burnham refuses to acknowledge that anything has happened since about October 1990 (the height of Madchester, appropriately).
He is still 20 years old, still the bright northern lad at Cambridge with hair horns and the coolest girlfriend, and the Beautiful South are still at No1 with ‘A Little Time’.
John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the long list of subsequent nits – no, didn’t happen.
Britain in 1990 is a world that many would wish to return to.
But you have to face reality to deal with reality.
‘Britain took a series of wrong turns in the 1980s’, says Andy, 36 years later, as if the Eighties were a few months ago.
While I am all for long-term thinking, this is fascinatingly nonsensical.
And why stop there?
Down with Stafford Cripps!
Kick out Bonar Law!
It is bizarre, this throwing back of our current malaise to the most recent period that we were governed remotely competently.
It takes blinkers of a most peculiar kind to look at Britain in 2026 – benefits bill bringing us to the verge of bankruptcy; mass immigration, both legal and illegal, destroying the social framework of centuries; staggering rates of taxation choking any hope of economic recovery – and conclude that the problem is Margaret Thatcher.
But she remains the indivisible, indigestible block in the guts of the ageing British progressive.
They can’t let Maggie go.
Things are bad?
It must be because of Thatcher, not the subsequent 36 years of progressive rule.
In fact, in what passes for Burnham’s mind, the problem must be that her successors were not progressive *enough*.
So he has to correct that.
This is quite frighteningly infantile when you stop to think about it.
Burnham is running an ancient mental model that simply cannot be updated by new facts – Windows 3.0 in the age of Windows 11.
I told you he is stranger than he seems.
His amiable envelope disguises this madness.
He may be strikingly inane in his tone, but he is strikingly insane in his thinking.
He has kept details of his actual plans very vague.
What do we know?
Apparently, he intends to take the political fight to Reform UK head on – with policies such as increasing immigration by admitting the Boriswave at terrifying cost, genuflecting to Hamas and immiserating the final remaining pockets of wealth that are keeping the entire show just barely on the road.
He seems to desire the return of British Leyland, which will somehow empower the working class.
And this wonky *Weltanschauung* is why he cannot succeed.
His in-tray is heavy with 2026 problems, and he has a 1990 mind (maybe even a 1978 mind).
The first horrible exogenous atrocity of his premiership – and there will be many, things being as they are – will confront him with contemporary reality, but he will be unable to process it.
In fact, the happy-chappy banter already clashes in a very ugly way against the substance, such as it is.
‘We got that wrong’, he mumbled earlier this month, in his apology to Hamas and their British-born proxies.
And who has he assembled as his team?
Louise Haigh, a convicted fraudster as the first secretary of state – but this doesn’t seem to matter somehow.
Loopy Net Zero fanatic Miatta Fahnbulleh as energy secretary.
His director of political strategy is Matthew McGregor – a name which sounds like a spoof version of Morgan McSweeney.
Maybe he can be followed by Michael McClaren or Mitchell McFarlane?
McGregor is a disastrous quango progressive, all up for the repatriation of ISIS brides and a former head honcho of sinister outfits 38 Degrees and the egregiously misnamed Hope Not Hate.
Burnham is laughably unqualified for the job of prime minister, a job he has been wafted into not by the public but at the urgent demand of the tragic one-term Weebles on the Labour backbenches.
His arrival in Westminster has been incredible to behold.
Andy Burnham, the also-ran non-entity who falls apart at the suggestion of a difficult question, whose only mark in government in the New Labour era was the MRSA scandal… *this* is Labour’s messiah?
It can only end in disaster, because neither he nor they can face the reality of what they have done to Britain.
They are living in a false paradise.
In the words of Charlene in the spoken section of her 1982 No1 smash, ‘I’ve Never Been To Me’:
*‘Hey!
You know what paradise is?
It’s a lie.
A fantasy we create about people and places as we’d like them to be.’
*
Of course, Andy Burnham is not the answer to Britain’s decline.
That would take superhuman powers of forbearance and a revival of Victorian-era levels of dedication and enterprise.
It also requires honesty and judgement – two interlocking qualities that this trivial twit does not possess and cannot hope to provide.
The best we can hope for is that the Burnham era is the final stop of the cognitive dissonance roadshow.
That it’s the last splutter of progressivism – and the terminal stage of the final Labour government.
**Gareth Roberts** is a screenwriter, author and novelist, best known for his work on *Doctor Who*.
This is an edited extract from his ‘Working Class Zeroes’ series on Substack.
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