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Photo by Stefan Rousseau / PA Images As Andy Burnham toured the country this summer, meeting voters and hearing about how life really is for people in the country he now governs, he began taking notes. In snatched moments in-between visits, on trains and in the back of his ministerial car, he wrote about the change the country needs, what has been done right by Westminster, and what politics has got wrong. In an “iterative process”, refined by what voters were saying to him, it became the statement Burnham delivered in parliament on 1 September, his first to the House of Commons as Prime Minister.
“He’s had a decade away to think about what’s been done well and not well,” a No 10 insider says. “He obviously came back to Westminster with a clear vision for what he wanted to do. But over the last six weeks out and about, he’s refined that further.” He already had a sense that the change people needed from politics is bigger than anything that has been offered by governments of recent years, including Keir Starmer’s.
The summer only reaffirmed it for him, while underlining that where government policy is strong – on Ukraine, for example – there is no point in change for the sake of it. Subscribe to the New Statesman this summer - 2 months for only £2 Related
Source: New Statesman
