Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[mongers]

I wonder what the sequence is, Burnham will only be the 8th* labour PM, feels like we nearly had that number of Tories in the the last decade?



* don't hold me to that, as counting on fingers exercise.

[HVC]

Sometimes terms make sense. I can't image that turnstile of leaders in the UK helps with voter fatigue and turn out.

[garbon]

Sometimes terms make sense. I can't image that turnstile of leaders in the UK helps with voter fatigue and turn out.

For voters, we've only had 3 general elections (rest of those PMs were chosen by party) in past 10 years when if stuck only to terms, should have 2 in a 10 year span?

[HVC]

Sometimes terms make sense. I can't image that turnstile of leaders in the UK helps with voter fatigue and turn out.

For voters, we've only had 3 general elections (rest of those PMs were chosen by party) in past 10 years when if stuck only to terms, should have 2 in a 10 year span?

Fair enough, and as a parlimentary system the same could happen in Canada (although to the best of my recollection hasn't happened in my lifetime). Just seems like so many leaders

[garbon]

Sometimes terms make sense. I can't image that turnstile of leaders in the UK helps with voter fatigue and turn out.

For voters, we've only had 3 general elections (rest of those PMs were chosen by party) in past 10 years when if stuck only to terms, should have 2 in a 10 year span?

Fair enough, and as a parlimentary system the same could happen in Canada (although to the best of my recollection hasn't happened in my lifetime). Just seems like so many leaders

Oh I think it is obscene. Of course, perhaps we are getting the leadership we deserve...

[viper37]

Sometimes terms make sense. I can't image that turnstile of leaders in the UK helps with voter fatigue and turn out.

For voters, we've only had 3 general elections (rest of those PMs were chosen by party) in past 10 years when if stuck only to terms, should have 2 in a 10 year span?

It still beginning to look a lot Belgium a few years ago.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Sometimes terms make sense. I can't image that turnstile of leaders in the UK helps with voter fatigue and turn out.

For voters, we've only had 3 general elections (rest of those PMs were chosen by party) in past 10 years when if stuck only to terms, should have 2 in a 10 year span?

It still beginning to look a lot Belgium a few years ago.

Never thought to see Belgium leading the way in anything much... 

[Sheilbh]

But that wasn't what I was asking or saying. I was more of the vein of does the elected manifest matter as PM and circumstances change? Sort of more in line with Jos that PM should be free to change up actions if what as brainstormed a couple years back doesn't suit. I'm not sure that the general voter would expect a general election must happen before that is allowed.

Yeah - I mean none of this is hard and fast it is ultimately politics and political skill. I think on that Burnham is far better placed than Starmer.

But I think there is a difference between circumstances and PM changing. So 9/11 happens six months after the 2001 election or covid a few months after 2019. I think voters and politicians in general get that these things are not in the manifesto and governmnts are going to respond. But for example Labour went into the 2024 election with a very specific set of promises on tax, for example, I think if Burnham now came in and decided to break them it would be very difficult politically. The fact that Labour - because it is in their political interest - have chosen to replace their leader doesn't just wipe out the promises and pitch made to voters two years ago.

I think you and mongers are right that if things are very popular it won't matter. My slight pushback on that would be that change is never particularly popular and significant change always has losers. If there were easy, affordable, universally popular policy decisions even a government as useless as Starmer's would have made them. That's not the world of politics is about choosing - and particularly on the left, the old Bevan, "the language of priorities is the religion of socialism".

This is where the politics is interesting where I can start to see the argument for an election (and there are a few) is that normally replacement PMs are the Chancellor, or Foreign Secretary, or Home Secretary and there is a fundamental underlying continuity. Burnham is unique (and it's quite presidential) in having run from outside parliament, explicitly as a change candidate - he will apparently get rid of Reeves (rejoice), I agree with RH that he should be bold but the party he is leading was not elected on that manifesto. I think this sort of gets to why parties in government tend to prefer a continuity candidate v an outsider. Whether he needs a new mandate or not depends on his political skill and whether he can make the argument of it is change but in continuity, and how ambitious he wants to be.

Though from the rest of your post, it seems like you think the Lords would see it imperative and thus would block non-manifesto legislation.

Not necessarily but the point here is that constitutionaly the Lords as unelected, undemocratic, illegitimate revising chamber will not block legislation that reflects a manifesto commitment. The legitimate government in the elected, democratic chamber went to the public promising to do that and they won a majority - so the Lords will give way (though they may amend it).

If it wasn't in the manifesto then the Lords are not bound by that and would feel absolutely entitled to oppose that legislation. Taxes don't really apply here beccause the Lords never block a finance bill, but changes to the voting system is one where I think the Lords would push back hard. You are changing the fundamentals of how governments are elected - you need a democratic mandate to do that. It is something you needed to say before the last election that you would do. In this case people are sympathetic because Burnham supports electoral reform in a direction they sympathise with - but you can see the argument

I think it gets to the heart of the British constitution in a way. It's not a legal constitution with lots of legalist, formal protections of what you can and can't do, it is instead a political constitution. You can kind of do what you want but you have to make the argument openly, convince the people and bear the political costs of doing it. You can't run on one platform and then do the opposite (I think this is where British conceptions/traditions of democracy slightly struggle with coalition negotiations or European-style consensus traditions) - or, you can because you have a majority in the Commons, but there's a strong argument that your opponents can use and the Lords can block you raising the political cost.

[Sheilbh]

For voters, we've only had 3 general elections (rest of those PMs were chosen by party) in past 10 years when if stuck only to terms, should have 2 in a 10 year span?

I think it depends - governments that are polling well normally call elections after 4 years, governments that are doing badly normally hold on to the last possible minute and go for 5 years. But yeah we've had more PMs in recent years than Man United have had permanent managers

It is a relatively unprecedented era of churn but I think part of it is also heightened by coming after an unprecedented era of stability. If you look across history the average term of a PM is actually 3-4 years (which indicates that historically it's about 50/50 whether a PM is voted in/out or comes to power/is removed from power mid-term). From 1979 to 2007 we had three Prime Ministers which is also pretty unprecedented and weird.

I wonder what the sequence is, Burnham will only be the 8th* labour PM, feels like we nearly had that number of Tories in the the last decade?

Yeah this is one of the things that slightly worries me. Labour doesn't remove leaders. And while, historically, as Wilson said there's always been a tradition of the "flash of cold steel" in the Tories - I think something changed in 1990. I think removing Thatchaer who was a historically significant, very effective PM and their greatest electoral success unlocked something in the Conservative Party. I think since then any issue or problem becomes about the leadership - so off the top of my head after Thatcher only William Hague and David Cameron (and Michael Howard, but he's a bit different) didn't face a formal leadership challenge in their leadership/being removed by their party.

My favourite UK politics podcast has Tim Montgomerie on it who was a founder of Conservative Home and has defected to Reform. He had a really interesting comment that one of the biggest differences for him is that, so far, Farage is unquestionably the best leader for Reform and there aren't leadership challenges (that may change now they've brought in Robert Jenrick). He said that being in the Tories you were always talking about the leadership - it was a constant stream of who's up/who's down, do they need to go etc. And he argues it became actually a really unhelpful and unhealthy part of the party culture.

That has not been the tradition and I do wonder what happens now Labour has crossed the rubicon and removed a sitting leader (the first to be forced out since George Lansbury in 1935) and a sitting PM. And having said that, looking at those Tory changes - I think the change from Thatcher to Major, IDS to Howard, May to Johnson and Truss to Sunak were the right choices and beneficial for the party while I think only Johnson to Truss was a mistake. So it might well help them politically, but I do wonder if it shifts the culture of a party and makes basically all of its politics subordinate to the politics of the horserace/leadership.

[Sheilbh]

I see Wes Streeting has folded, so I guess the coronation is on?

There was talk of the Starmtroopers trying to get a continuity candidate to challenge - probably Darren Jones

But I doubt they have the numbers. So it definitely looks like it - and the scenes today are so weird for our system of him sweeping down on (an unusually efficient and timely) Avanti train, meeting the parliamentary Labour Party en masse like a conquering hero.

I did quite enjoy the heckles at his swearing in. Desmond Swayne's "Rome is saved!" (fantastic article in the Times about Burnham's Catholicism which I'll post later), then someone shouting "he's not the messiah" and Burnham replying that he was a "naughty boy" instead

[HVC]

Will he be the first catholic PM? I know Johnston had a weird history (born catholic but converted). Either way Guy Fawkes is vindicated!

[Sheilbh]

Oh I think it is obscene. Of course, perhaps we are getting the leadership we deserve...

Yeah...I'm not sure. Isabel Hardman's Why We Get the Wrong Politicians is really good.

And I do think the British public's views are broadly incoherent on lots of things and generally don't like change - but I think that's true of lots of voters all over the world. They just want a PM who'll give them free stuff and loads of money to the NHS but only tax other people, not build anything but make the trains better, get to net zero, cut their bills and make housing affordable, stop the boats and make Deliveroo and everything else chaper, and most important - don't change anything.

On the other hand I also think that while I disagree with them to varying degrees Thatcher, Blair and Cameron all served for a good amount of time and did things that were pretty unpopular because they made an argument for it, were able to lead and people were willing to go along. I'm not sure any of our recent leaders have really been able or willing to do that - and maybe there is a structural shift there and there's a chicken and egg side to that analysis.

[garbon]

I see Wes Streeting has folded, so I guess the coronation is on?

There was talk of the Starmtroopers trying to get a continuity candidate to challenge - probably Darren Jones

But I doubt they have the numbers. So it definitely looks like it - and the scenes today are so weird for our system of him sweeping down on (an unusually efficient and timely) Avanti train, meeting the parliamentary Labour Party en masse like a conquering hero.

I did quite enjoy the heckles at his swearing in. Desmond Swayne's "Rome is saved!" (fantastic article in the Times about Burnham's Catholicism which I'll post later), then someone shouting "he's not the messiah" and Burnham replying that he was a "naughty boy" instead

It does look very strange. And especially if that's what they are doing, then Kemi is correct that there's no reason to wait until September.

[Sheilbh]

Will he be the first catholic PM? I know Johnston had a weird history (born catholic but converted). Either way Guy Fawkes is vindicated!

First cradle Catholic.

Blair regularly went to mass in Westminster Cathedral (and had to be told by the Pope to stop taking communion), he also had a lengthy private meeting with the Pope during his resignation world tour and converted within days of leaving office. Boris Johnson, absurdly, is our first Catholic PM-ish baptised, then confirmed Anglican, then I think back in a Catholic Church for his third marriage.

Burnham is the first cradle Catholic - from the most traditionally Catholic bit of England, with a huge Irish population. I think this article's fantastic but part of that (and something I'm very aware of when I look at Burnham) is how much I recognise. We were in Liverpool itself but I remember those cassettes that Archbishop Worlock used to send round - I remember his voice from my childhood it was so formative. My mum still speaks very fondly of Archbishop Worlock (except for Pope Francis, no church leader has come close to how much she liked Worlock and Cardinal Hume) - I was an altar boy as well. But also even though I was born a few years after the Pope's visit in the 80s my school was absolutely full of John-Pauls So it is a distinctive, specific Catholic culture Andy Burnham comes from - not the same as the alt-right or bookish/aesthetic converts. But also Everton, the Boys From the Blackstuff, the Church and as he says not altar-lickers (my dad claimed to have done a deal with a priest which meant he didn't need to do confession  ).

And I think it matters I think part of Burnham's popularity is there is a charismatic and emotional way that he campaigns/communicates or hs style of politics which I think is possibly from his Catholic (and Irish) background - I think it's actually quite American too (possibly because of the influence of Catholic immigration to the US). I thin it's quite distinctive to the more buttoned down affect of the Protestants who normally rule us (with the slight exception of the barn-storming/oratorical tradition of the non-conformist churches particularly in Wales):

How the Catholic church shaped Andy Burnham
Catholicism defined the home, the school and the streets where the new MP grew up. It moulded the view that this former altar boy would take into Downing Street

Andy Burnham lights a candle in Manchester Cathedral after the Queen's death in 2022
Martin Rickett/PA
Patrick Maguire
Friday June 19 2026, 7.10pm, The Times

Years ago, a younger, upwardly mobile version of Andy Burnham liked to explain himself to interviewers with a neat little tricolon. There were three institutions that made him, shaped him — meant something to him. They were Everton Football Club, the Labour Party and the Catholic Church. "In that order."

Three weeks ago, as we sat watching Wigan Warriors win the Challenge Cup in the beer garden of the old Labour club at Stubshaw Cross his by-election victory has made famous, I heard Burnham quote that line again, a little wistfully: "I always used to say ... "

It had come to mind after I told him something similar that an old boy from the area had told me: that Makerfield's towns were built by the Labour Party, the church and rugby league. Now they only bothered with league.

Burnham and I spoke about that and the Labour Party at length. We did not dwell on the church. But I left, heading for the M6, and I was reminded that the old boy's word "built" had been meant literally. Next door to Burnham HQ was St Wilfrid's Church. The focal point of Ashton's high street is the Sir Thomas Gerard, a Wetherspoons pub named in honour of a recusant patriarch.

Come off the motorway and drive into town, as I did countless times over the course of the campaign, and an outsider really knows they have hit Ashton once they pass St Oswald's Catholic Club. It was not only what I kept seeing, it was what I kept hearing. Burnham and Robert Kenyon, Nigel Farage's plumber, spoke endlessly of "Eddie Arrow's", by which they meant St Edmund Arrowsmith, the Catholic secondary school that Burnham's three children and the Reform UK candidate had all attended.

What is left of St Edmund himself is kept in a glass jar in the church that bears both his name and that of St Oswald, just over the Liverpool Road from the Catholic club. It's his right hand, all black and grey and desiccated now. The rest of Arrowsmith, a Jesuit priest born in nearby Haydock, was hanged, drawn and quartered before a bloodthirsty crowd in Lancaster in 1628.

For years he had administered Mass from the wardrobes of families who felt compelled to practise their faith in secret and lived to tell the tale, but in the end he was undone by the treachery of a man who had sought his counsel after marrying a cousin.

Arrowsmith died defiant. "Be witnesses with me that I die a constant Roman Catholic and for Christ's sake," he said after his sentence was handed down. "Let my death be an encouragement to your going forward in the Catholic religion." And so they did. He could not have imagined that Catholic schools in England, funded by the state, would one day bear his name. No Catholic priest executed for their religious beliefs would possibly believe it. Nor that the King's first minister would one day be a cradle Catholic from the Lancashire he knew so well.

It is not strictly true to say that Andy Burnham will be our first Catholic prime minister. That distinction, absurdly, belongs to Boris Johnson — baptised Catholic, confirmed as an Anglican, married on the third go in Westminster Cathedral. Sir Tony Blair converted almost the minute he left Downing Street in 2007. But neither man was made by it. Blair did not arrive at Labourism via Catholicism.

Burnham, however, has described it all as irresistible. "I've always said — and some people won't like this," he said in 2012, as shadow health secretary, "that what I used to have to read in the catechism, the enfranchisement of it on Earth was the Labour Party." He had no choice but to be Labour because he was born a Catholic, and the son of a Liverpool Catholic who was reared and came to political consciousness in the 1980s at that.

When the new MP for Makerfield talks of place-first politics, it is not merely a slogan or post-devolution babble. The underexamined and misunderstood brand of Labour politics — and the style that so persistently rubbed Westminster up the wrong way — was shaped by the Catholic Church and churchmen of the 1980s as much as anything else.

And, as he told the broadcaster James O'Brien in 2022, his teachers too: "When I was at those Catholic schools ... the vast majority of the staff were kind of Labour-leaning people and encouraged me in that direction."

Burnham's father, Roy, was notionally Protestant but not religious: his allegiance to Everton was more important to his in-laws. It was from his mother, Eileen — from Irish stock, as the name would imply — that the younger Burnham inherited the faith in which he was raised.

He and Eileen shared, he said during his 2010 leadership campaign, an "unshowy" Catholicism. "I am like her in that, to use a Scouse phrase, we don't lick the altar steps." Burnham's mother begged to differ in a 2015 interview with the Daily Mirror: "You should have seen the fights he and his brothers had on Sundays. They were all altar boys but Andy had to be the one at the front holding the Communion plate."

But the church was almost everywhere. And almost everywhere, in those days in Merseyside and its environs — Burnham's childhood was spent in Culcheth, near Warrington in Cheshire — was the church. It was, of course, their mother's prized porcelain nun the Burnham brothers broke with an errant football, much to her chagrin. Even Merseyside's best pop was Catholic.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark sang more than once of Joan of Arc and of little Catholic girls who'd fallen in love; Pete Wylie's last real hit was a song called Sinful, which he performed on Top of the Pops with a troupe of dancing nuns whom John Peel dubbed the Little Sisters of the Anfield Road End.

The recordings that most influenced the politics of the young Burnham, however, carried the voice of Archbishop of Liverpool Derek Worlock, who did as much if not more to shape his city's leftish sense of self than its other Derek: Hatton, of Militant. Andy Burnham was an altar boy who pressed "play" on the tapes, which were of sermons recorded for the benefit of smaller parishes in little towns like Burnham's — in little towns like the ones he now represents in Makerfield.

Worlock was not so much the dangerous liberal his critics in government and in Rome believed him to be, despite his doomed attempts to convince the Vatican to relax its edict on contraception for married couples and to allow gluten-free communion wafers. He knew and loved his laity, warts and all, and believed the urban working class needed its own style of humane ministry.

In that spirit he became so close to his Anglican counterpart Bishop David Sheppard that the two in effect undid the English Reformation in one city. And it was Worlock who took to the steps of Liverpool's Catholic Cathedral to preach to 6,000 shellshocked Scousers the day after the Hillsborough disaster.

Worlock became a whipping boy for the Police Federation after the Toxteth riots of 1981. They accused him of putting perpetrator before victim with offers of legal aid and criticism of Margaret Thatcher. When Pope John Paul II visited in 1982, Worlock sent the Vatican motorcade (for timekeeping reasons, he insisted) through the Liverpool 8 district and the scene of the devastation. He sought unsuccessfully to mediate in the miners' strike of 1984 — the Liverpool archdiocese covered the Catholic parishes that served the pitmen and pit wives of St Helens and Wigan.


The Most Rev Derek Worlock, the archbishop of Liverpool, right, with the Rt Rev David Sheppard, the bishop of Liverpool, was a huge influence in Burnham's youth
Avalon/Getty Images

"I can pray for [my neighbour's] soul, but I cannot turn my back on how he is to live: his wellbeing, his freedom, his prosperity or poverty, his house, his job and so on," Worlock said at the height of his fame. "All that lies in the field of politics, whether I like it or not. So it is part of my double commitment, to God and neighbour."

A direct link with Labour values

The young Burnham, who took Michael as his confirmation name, watched and listened with a kind of awed reverence. "There was, and still is, a direct read-across between what I was learning at school and church and Labour values," he has said. "And also what I was seeing then, in the mid-Eighties — how people were being treated — wasn't an expression of Christian values."

The church he knew was compassionate, forgiving, even irreverent. He read the catechism, listened to Worlock, saw the miners striking outside the pit at Golborne (where he still lives), watched Yosser Hughes lose his mind in Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff, saw the devastation wrought by the city's decline on the north Liverpool streets around his secular church, Goodison Park.

And so his two religions, the Catholic and the Evertonian, begot the party politics. "I've always felt that there's a connection between the three in terms of identity and that's about the underdog, a sense of solidarity, and values," he said in 2010. It also manifested itself in the half-and-half Everton and Celtic ski hat he wore for a period as a teen.

Understand this and the Burnham of Makerfield does not seem like a performance by a cynical Cambridge-educated special adviser. It looks and sounds much more like the altar boy, pained and sincere and reared in the kind of Catholic community where, as one old friend jokes, "if you kick one, they all limp". It was a practical faith, a culture — a word Burnham and I discussed at length last month, for he believes London Labour's prevailing culture has precious little in common with the ordinary families watching rugby league in front of us — that put a romantic class solidarity before theology.

Joe Gormley, still the most celebrated leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, explained it well in his memoir, Battered Cherub. Gormley was himself from Ashton-in-Makerfield and defended himself — and his hard-drinking pit mates — from charges of sin. "I don't believe you have to go to church every Sunday to be a good, or even a religious, person."

Indeed, Burnham — unlike, say, Tony Blair, who seeks out Catholic chapels even when travelling abroad — is only an occasional Mass-goer. "It's about identity," that old friend adds. "It's not about whether you've read the latest encyclical." Indeed, the encyclical that best speaks to Burnham's relationship with his faith, Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, the basis for the Catholic social teaching with which he has so strongly identified in the past, was published in 1891.

Since then, only Worlock and Pope Francis, whom Burnham met in the Vatican in 2023, really matter. Having been sharply critical of Pope Benedict's prescriptive approach to theology and questions of identity, Burnham praised his successor as a leader who "spoke for equality and compassion and for humanity, in a world where we see political leaders target minorities and marginalise people in the search for votes".

He gave Francis a Manchester United shirt signed by Lisandro Martinez, a fellow Argentine, and spoke to him of his work to end rough sleeping in Manchester. Of that conversation he proudly told the BBC: "He nodded vigorously, as if to say, 'Carry on with that, we want more of that'."

Faith that comes from experience

What more can we expect from our first true Catholic prime minister in Downing Street? Not, as Burnham's repeated criticism of the Church's "austere and judgmental" record on gay rights make clear, any semblance of conservatism on questions of sexuality. Unlike other Catholic cabinet ministers under Blair and Brown, such as Ruth Kelly, a member of Opus Dei who was absent for most votes on New Labour's liberalisation of gay rights, Burnham voted for the big-ticket social reforms introduced by those governments.

He did not back a bid to cut the abortion time limit in 2008 but he voted unsuccessfully to preserve the "need for a father" when same-sex couples conceived by IVF. He questioned the Assisted Dying Bill brought before the Commons by Labour's Kim Leadbeater last year but not on principle: instead, he worried about underfunded hospices. Again, to the extent that his faith was brought to bear, it was through experience and not theological abstraction. This is not the kind of Catholicism that now holds so much sway in Washington, worn heavily and traditionally, often book-learnt by converts, as it is in pockets of the British radical right.

But it belongs to Burnham and, if you take a walk through Ashton or read the name of the rugby league club next door to the tough housing estate of Worsley Mesnes, you will see it once belonged to Makerfield too. In one constituency is the entire troubled, class-conscious history of Catholicism in the north: the recusants who strove, often suicidally, to resist London's authority; the waves of immigrants, most of them Irish — like Burnham's great-grandparents — who found themselves impoverished and struggling for individual and collective dignity.

They eventually found its expression through the Labour Party, which owed its hold on the working class neither to Methodism nor to Marx but to the poor of every non-conformist faith. That world is gone but its descendants and values remain.

Burnham, really, is a believer in these people, in a vision and values of community, rather than God alone. Once he is sworn back into the Commons on the Jerusalem Bible on Monday, he will have the fleeting opportunity to make the Labour Party theirs again. Just as they did in the 18th century, when pilgrims walked for miles to touch the linen bag that held the hand of Edmund Arrowsmith, they hope Keir Starmer's new Catholic martyr can provide his own miracle cure.

[Sheilbh]

It does look very strange. And especially if that's what they are doing, then Kemi is correct that there's no reason to wait until September.

It's not plausible. There's a NATO summit, there's an EU "reset" meeting, there will be a budget in Autumn. How could Starmer plausibly go to those? And Starmer havnig to turn up every week to PMQs to get battered for literally being in office but not in power. I get it if there's a leadership race but otherwise it's just not do-able.

It sounds like Starmer has said he'll stay until July if there's not a leadership race (it sounds like he wants to go to the NATO summit as a swansong for some reason - I actually think it'd be helpful for the new PM to meet our allies but there we are) and will only stay on until September if there is a leadership contest.