In search of an analogy for Andy Burnham’s coup

For obvious reasons, and despite a hailstorm of speculation, we have yet to see any solid policy changes guaranteed from Andy Burnham’s team, and pundits are still in the personality-assessment stage of the recruiting process. Happily, this is where I feel most able to contribute.

I suppose I might be in a bubble, but I have yet to see anyone outside of the Parliamentary Labour Party suggest that once the clouds of glory have dissipated over Euston Station, the UK’s next prime minister will be anything other than a tremendous disappointment.

Actually, that’s not quite correct. Some people expect so little that disappointment would be impossible, but you get my drift.

This might be to underestimate the threat that Burnham represents. If he does institute radical changes to the tax code, make Britain an even more hostile environment for the ambitious, wealthy, aspirational or merely talented and hardworking, and double down on all the worst parts of the past two years (Net Zero in particular), then he could do far more damage than is evoked by mere disappointment.

In the meantime, it’s useful to settle on a reliable mental model for what is going on right now. We need a decent analogy for the regicide and coronation that we are witnessing.

Here, I offer up half a dozen analogies prêt-à-porter – parables that I have not seen overused just yet, should you want to impress colleagues or, if WFH, the dog.

Perhaps most popular is Burnham as ‘the King over the Water’, a reference to the exiled Stuart claimants to the English throne. It works even if the water is the Manchester Shipping Canal. It certainly harnesses the sturdy romantic conviction of the Jacobites and the British myth of the great lost cause.

More prosaic perhaps, but still convincing, is Burnham as the bottle of Limoncello at the back of the cabinet – the one you finally resort to when everything else that anyone actually brought to the party has long ago been drunk, but you don’t want to admit defeat.

You can never go wrong quoting or gesturing towards Shakespeare when you are discussing back-stabbing conspirators or legitimacy crises. The Hollow Crown sequence in Richard II offers a pretty striking parallel, with Burnham as Henry Bolingbroke (emphasis on the last syllable) aka Henry V. Casting Keir Starmer as Richard II offers some tantalising echoes and rhymes of 14th-century title-tattle intended to delegitimise his rule. But you do need to grasp quite a bit of subtle and tangled dynastical backstory to make this work in general conversation and are likely to lose the attention of the rabble if you’re not careful.

Kemi Badenoch seems to have been more tempted by the dorsal knives of the Roman assassination, the Caesarean ‘Et tu, Brute?’ scenario, when discussing Starmer’s ousting during yesterday’s PMQs. Yet no matter how hard Labour MPs have tried to, portraying Starmer as ‘the noblest man that ever lived in the tide of times’, or even since 2024, is a stretch. He hath not, by my reckoning, bestrode this narrow world like a colossus, or even given the impression that he could step over a garden hose without breaking his stride.

Besides, Burnham is neither convincingly Mark Antony nor Octavian / Augustus in this case. It could be worth toying with out loud, perhaps, but not backing it too hard.

Another point of bardic reference when you hear the name Andy Burnham might be the homophonic Birnam Wood from Macbeth. The witches prophesise that Macbeth will not be overthrown until Birnam Wood moves towards his castle in Dunsinane, and that he cannot be harmed by a man born of a woman. He mistakes this ominous warning for a ‘nothing-to-worry-about old son’ all clear.

Whether Andy is ‘of woman born’ or was untimely ripp’d – another Caesarean reference – from his mother’s womb, history or at least Wikipedia does not relate. But his stealthy approach to No10 this past month or two has been less like Birnam Wood advancing on Dunsinane, than the game old campaigners Jonesy, Godfrey, Walker et al stumbling down a gentle slope, barely obscured by a few optimistic sprigs at the end of every episode of Dad’s Army. Which does chime all too convincingly.

Starmer, though, cannot be meaningfully compared with the bloodthirsty would-be tyrant that Macbeth became, any more than he can be with Caesar. I do not mean this, let me emphasise, as a compliment. I think more than a few Labour supporters would have liked to see him dial up the ‘in blood stepped so far’ calculation a little more when the going got rough. But rather than turn the multitudinous seas incarnadine, Starmer’s anaemic style has, if anything, turned more than a few red types Green. He strikes most people as so profoundly bloodless that he could barely stain a pocket handkerchief, let alone Neptune’s ocean.

Besides, Starmer did not seize No10 in a bloody coup. No one was murdered in their beds. Starmer has always been much more ‘Is this a procedure I see before me?’ kind of guy. Nor is his missus the classic Lady Macbeth figure that Carrie Johnson was persuasively portrayed as.

Staying with archaic references, the Second Coming is always promising, and the word ‘Messianic’ has certainly been thrown around lately – even more often than at a Russell Brand gig.

Again, it’s worth probing the thickness of that ice to see if it will bear weight. The first thing one has to ask is who was the First Coming in terms of Labour prime ministers? Clement Attlee? No one before colour TV has a chance of landing now (Shakespeare is mythical and thus exempt). Harold Wilson is perhaps more appealing, a northern man with the common touch and a prophet of economic growth, who called a snap election in the year that England won the World Cup, which I would certainly welcome, on both fronts.

That is certainly a better fit for Burnham than the only other possible candidate that the Labour faithful would like to see reincarnated – namely, Tony Blair. Putting aside the footling administrative wrinkle, that Blair is not actually dead yet, his presidential style, sinister charisma and vote-winning panache would surely be welcome after the leadership of a barely animated root vegetable. But Blair has blood on his hands. And easy as it is for those of us on the other side to forget, many Labourites despaired of Starmer because he wasn’t left-wing enough. The real trouble with this analogy is that it is too close to the facts to allow a little poetry to bloom. There is no spark, no room for a creative leap.

So in the end, I am going to suddenly abandon the learned and pretentious and offer instead an analogy much more in keeping with Burnham’s own man-of-the-people style. This is like the sort of changeover that any football fan has seen on myriad occasions when their team is two-nil down away – when their star striker has failed to live up to his billing, and they bring on some knackered, old war horse, in a desperate attempt to turn things around. Chelsea, say, in the 1990-91 season, taking off Kerry Dixon and bringing on Kevin Wilson. But everyone will have their own version.

It’s not a perfect fit. For one thing, we’ve barely passed the first hydration break, let alone half-time of Labour’s term in office. But at least this one has a certain democratic appeal.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Staring at the Sun, are on sale here.