Extra, extra, read all about it! Andy Burnham is ‘wargaming’ a snap general election after his ‘honeymoon’ period on becoming Prime Minister.
No he isn’t.
For a start, those Labour backbenchers whose support he needs to unseat Surkeir Starmer won’t let him.
We’re talking Bernard Matthews and Christmas here. Why would all those fourth-rate ex-teachers, social workers and minor union officials who belly-flopped into Westminster as part of Labour’s loveless landslide agree to put themselves out of work after just two and a bit years of a fat salary and treble expenses all round?
Or pass up the chance to turn Britain into an irreversible Maoist basket case before they are finally cast into the dustbin of history?
So why are we forced to put up with this drivel?
Days like this I feel I’m living in a parallel universe. While the rest of us are wondering how we’re going to pay the sky-rocketing bills for just about everything, or simply avoid being nicked for doing 22mph at midnight on a deserted dual carriageway, the Boys and Girls in the Bubble are agonising about the internal machinations of the Labour Party.
I had been planning to keep my powder dry on Makerfield until the week of the by-election. But the whole circus is getting on my wossnames. The widespread acceptance that it’s perfectly natural to parachute in somebody who didn’t stand at the last general election so he can become PM is an outrage.
Andy Burnham with supporters during the launch of his Makerfield by-election campaign last month. ‘If you believe the polls, which I don’t, Burnham could scrape home by two or three per cent,’ writes Richard Littlejohn
As the Daily Mail’s front page put it perfectly today: Burnham’s already behaving like a PM in waiting.
We’re even told he’s lining up his new Cabinet and will give a cushy, lucrative job to the arslikhan MP who stood down to clear his path. It’s nauseating.
This isn’t democracy, it’s an anti-democratic stitch-up. No wonder union members are switching to Reform in droves. Labour are taking the proverbial out of ‘working people’ – especially those in Manchester and Makerfield itself and everyone else in the country who won’t get a say in who becomes our PM (with a different agenda no one has voted for) for the next three years.
Because, I repeat, there isn’t going to be a snap election, honeymoon period or otherwise.
Ask yourself this: if a two-bob chancer like Burnham (Manchester’s answer to London’s dictator-for-life Genghis Khan) finally achieves his ambition of becoming PM, why would he risk being booted out five minutes after moving into No 10?
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What sickens me to the pit of my stomach is the way the political class treat our tried-and-tested – albeit, not entirely perfect, and unravelling daily – system of parliamentary democracy as their personal plaything.
It was bad enough when the Tories changed Prime Ministers without bothering to consult the voters. Or when Gordon Brown was anointed unchallenged and then went on a lap of honour before Tony Blair was taken out and shot by the Labour Party.
The difference this time is that at least Gordon, Mother Theresa, Boris, Fizzy Lizzy and Dishy Rishi had been on the ballot at the general election.
Burnham, not so much. He was busy promising the good people of Manchester that he would serve a full term as their mayor.
Now he claims his dearest wish is to represent the good people of Makerfield, where he allegedly grew up – much as he pretended a few months ago in Gorton and Denton.
Presumably, if a safe-ish Labour seat had come up in Surrey, ‘King of the North’ Burnham would have pledged lifelong allegiance there, too – just as the Queen of the North, Angry Ginge, has settled in Hove Actually, a few hundred miles south of her North-West constituency.
(Over the Bank Holiday, Ginge was spotted taking the waters on Brighton beach, not as you might have expected, Blackpool.)
As for Josh Simons, the expendable Makerfield MP who fell on his sword to clear Burnham’s path in exchange for a well-paid sinecure in Whitehall, I wouldn’t keep him as a pet.
There is no reason that the circus has come to Makerfield, other than to smooth the way for Burnham. This is a by-election which shouldn’t be happening. Where’s Brenda from Bristol when you need her?
‘I had been planning to keep my powder dry on Makerfield until the week of the by-election. But the whole circus is getting on my wossnames,’ writes Richard Littlejohn. Pictured: Andy Burnham out for a jog in Manchester last month
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Not another one!
Yet the assumption in the Bubble is that all this is above board. As the great columnist John Junor, late of this parish, used to remark: Pass the sick bag, Alice.
If you believe the polls, which I don’t, Burnham could scrape home by two or three per cent. How, in Heaven’s name, does that give him a mandate to become Prime Minister of the whole of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland? It doesn’t, not in a million years.
And as for the bust-up between my old mates Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe, which could usher in Burnham by default, frankly I despair.
(I note that there was a traditional shin-kicking contest in Gloucestershire at the weekend. Maybe that’s the best way for the two of them to sort things out.)
The background to this particular blood feud could fill another column. I’ve known both of them for more than 25 years and I told you weeks ago that pleading with Rupert to stand down his Restore candidate in favour of the Faragistas would simply harden his resolve.
Like Tom Petty, you could stand him up at the gates of hell, but he won’t back down.
And although Rupe’s been a brilliant MP for Great Yarmouth, the only way to stop Burnham in Makerfield and inflict another blow on this disgraceful, useless Labour government is to vote Reform UK.
We can only hope that the people of Makerfield realise that Burnham is taking them for dupes. They deserve better than this cynical, hubristic, self-serving spiv, who has to be crushed before his ‘honeymoon’ period becomes a Nightmare on Downing Street.
