One of my favourite story games (I won’t bore you with the difference between a story and roleplaying game here) is Fiasco by Jason Morningstar. With the tagline “the game about people with powerful ambition and poor impulse control” this tabletop game seeks to emulate the “neo noir” genre of films such as the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple, Fargo and Burn After Reading; films in which the main characters, high on their own powers of self-belief, attempt to pull of the perfect heist, but things go terribly wrong.
I’ve been thinking about Fiasco and the Coen Brothers’ films a lot recently. Namely, whenever someone explains to me Andy Burnham’s plan to get the keys to Number 10.
All he has to do, you see, is find a winnable parliamentary by-election, be allowed by the Labour NEC to stand, win the selection, win the by-election, get nominated to stand in an election to oust Keir Starmer, get elected, win the election and get appointed by the King. Simples! And without any of that ghastly business of actually forming a majority after a general election, on a manifesto platform.
The thing is, no-one thinks they’re in a Coen Brothers’ film. Most politicians think they’re Danny Ocean: just when you think their intricate heist is about to all go wrong, it turns out that somebody has let off an Electromagnetic Pulse and shut down the whole casino. But this requires having the perfect plan that can go off pretty much without a hitch, and even when there is a snag, the fundamentals are such that a bit of last minute improvisation can get you over the winning line. In reality, they tend to be more like Harry Pfarrer.
There have been moments over the last week when I’ve wondered if maybe Burnham is going to pull off this coup. It has been remarkable to see the dominoes so far fall in perfect step. Persuading Josh Simons to stand down was remarkable, as was getting Keir Starmer and the Labour NEC to clear the path for him to stand. There is one huge hurdle still to be cleared, with Labour coming behind Reform in this month’s local elections in the Makerfield constituency. But frankly if he manages to pull that off, I can’t really see him struggling with the Labour leadership election.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about a lifetime of watching crime thrillers, it’s that there’s always a fix going on behind the scenes. And it seems fairly clear that, inside the Labour Party itself, the fix is in (even if Wes Streeting isn’t a party to it). Josh Simons isn’t just any old backbench MP; he’s the former director of Labour Together who was forced to resign as the minister for Digital Government when it was revealed that in his time as director of Labour Together he ran a smear campaign against journalists investigating the organisation.
Labour Together is of course the organisation that ran Keir Starmer’s own leadership election campaign, specifically by seeking to outflank more left-leaning candidates Lisa Nandy and Rebecca Long-Bailey with pledges which were quickly abandoned after the votes had been counted.
So it’s reasonable to ask: what did he agree with Starmer and Simons for them to make the way clear for him? And what is it about him that these lying liars see in him?
Actually winning Makerfield in a by-election is another matter, which Labour has far less control over. The prevailing wisdom inside Labour seems to be that since Burnham is far more popular than the Labour Party, the recent local elections can’t be relied on as much of a guide. But it is clear that Nigel Farage is going to throw his crypto-millions at this (there’s a statutory spending limit of £180,000 for candidates in by-elections but there are plenty of loopholes, such as paying for advertising that doesn’t mention any of the candidates). Reform is also likely to have learned the lessons of its mistakes in Gorton and Denton, where it was so confident of winning that it picked an untested darling of the hard right as their candidate instead of an individual with local credentials.
The prospect of Burnham losing is real enough that people are already starting to call for other parties to withdraw in his favour. Caroline Lucas is currently leading calls for the Greens to not field a candidate. Tellingly, nobody seems to care very much if the Lib Dems stand or not, which given their past capability of running by-election campaigns ought to be giving Ed Davey pause.
Makerfield is no Gorton and Denton. I would not blame Zack Polanski if he opted to field a paper candidate in this campaign and not lose any sleep about it; there are bigger priorities. If Labour are so desperate to get him to not field a candidate though, they need to publicly offer him something tangible. That’s just politics, right?
So it’s odd to hear people calling this a historic moment and the left needs to get behind Burnham in the name of sugar and spice and all things nice when Burnham’s commitment to the progressive causes he’s previously supported seems to be wavering.
He’s already watered down his commitment on rejoining the EU, something Wes Streeting is having fun undermining. This follows the “Red Wall” seat logic of not challenging Reform on their favourite topic. We should not be at all surprised therefore if he waters down his criticisms of Labour’s hostile policies on immigration.
By getting Burnham to stand in a marginal Reform seat, and then get him to dilute all of his more progressive policies in the name of “meeting people’s legitimate concerns” are we really witnessing the Labour leadership becoming more like Burnham, or Burnham becoming more like the Labour leadership? Are we being hoodwinked by Burnham, or is Burnham hoodwinking the Labour right?
My liberal and Lib Dem friends who live in Manchester are pretty unimpressed by Burnham. To a certain extent, I accept that this is bound to be coloured by tribalism; I see similar criticisms laid at Sadiq Khan, my London Labour mayor who I like, respect and voted positively for in 2024. But I also know from my time in that city how hard it is to get ahead in Greater Manchester politics without being deeply tribal and reactionary. And Andy Burnham’s politics do change like the weather. If the argument is that this time — this time — he’s finally fixed on a progressive political identity that stands against so much of what Keir Starmer has done in recent years, then it would be nice to have something more to go on than just his word.
Labour seems to have a choice in this by-election: let Burnham be Burnham and campaign on a platform of refuting Starmerism, or run a textbook Starmerite “Red Wall” campaign to neutralise the Reform threat. So far, the media buzz has been that he’ll fight a Red Wall campaign, while assuing us that he somehow represents a break from the past.
Campaigns that seek to run on both “contunuity” and “change” tend to come a cropper. It seems extraordinary that they seem to be exploring these options in real time, with such impossibly high stakes for the rest of us.
There’s something about his whole situation that sticks in my craw. I am extremely not okay with my next Prime Minister being effectively decided in a small constituency that I have no connection with, and nor should you. I’m not a fan of people voluntarily forcing not one, but two by-elections, at great cost to the taxpayer, for what resembles one man’s vanity project. I am appalled at the idea that a parliamentary party with over 400 MPs seems to have so small a talent pool that a guy who left parliamentary politics a decade ago is having to be parachuted in to fix things; and even then might fail, leaving us all stranded.
In this light, maybe it would be better if Andy Burnham lost this by-election? It would certainly be disastrous for the Labour Party and take us further towards a far right government, but it’s distinctly possible that Burnham could still win this and sink as Prime Minister anyway; the omens are not good. Too much of our future currently rests on the hope being invested in Burnham, but as wiser heads than me have pointed out: hope is not plan, and these by-election hijinks don’t resemble one.
Maybe Burnham losing this might force the party to finally get serious after nearly 20 years of failing to crawl out from under the shadow of Tony Blair? To stop pivoting between “Blair” and “anti-Blair” leaders and to rebuild itself around a pragmatic democratic socialist approach rather than endless remixes of centrism and triangulation?
Nah, I don’t think so either. But I don’t think Burnham losing this is quite as existential as his supporters seem to think it would be, simply because there are too many other things that can go wrong with it.
In the film Fargo, the character Carl Showalter (played by Steve Buscemi), the loudmouth self-proclaimed “brains” of the kidnapping gang ends up being fed into a wood chipper by his colleague Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare). Despite what certain Japanese office workers might think, this film is intended as a warning not an instruction manual.
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