Andy Burnham’s dream job is not really Prime Minister.
His real dream job, his true calling, is to be Oprah Winfrey. Pointing out to an ecstatic, adulating crowd: you get a car! You get a car! And you get a tax cut! And you get a welfare boost!
Andy Burnham is fuelled by popularity.
The whisper around Labour conference is that he is increasingly feeling scorned by Cabinet Ministers that try to outshine him. The good news must come from his mouth. Any bad news must come from his underlings.
He is a man obsessed with his own likeability: so you have to wonder what the effect will be on his psyche when the public inevitability turns on their man Andy.
Conference feels like the moment to find out. As you walk in, protestors scream in your face: Something, Something, Gaza! Something, Something, Animal testing! Something Something Europe! The advice is not to take their leaflets - as they’ve not been tested for anthrax.
Inside the secure zone, you cannot hear all of the speeches because the infamous anti-Brexit campaigner Steve Bray blasts out a series of increasingly bizarre pro-Europe songs.
It’s a stark, visual (and audible) reminder to the people-pleasing Prime Minister that you can’t please all the people, all the time.
I was at a dinner last night with a lobby journalist who shoved his phone under my nose to show me a headline, “Burnham to signal end of triple lock” - which I had fortuitously just been talking about (side note - it must now be a well-established fact that 10 Downing St are stealing policy ideas from the Monday Memo).
If the briefings are correct, Burnham is poised to lay the groundwork for a reform of the triple lock. This is the right thing to do. Cutting the triple lock - remember - does not represent a cut to pensions. It simply slows their rise. And doing so frees up a huge amount of the welfare bill, which can be used to pay towards the ballooning cost of social care.
Reforming it is the right thing to do. It is not some historical British human right, it was introduced in 2011. And it won’t be part of our future: an 18-year-old today will not benefit from a triple locked state pension (by the time they hit retirement age, if the triple lock stays in place, they’d collect a chunky £2,162 a week). Reform is inevitable.
But reform is unpopular. So can Burnham stomach it?
Business blues
Chancellor John Healey’s speech yesterday went down like a cup of warm sick with the business community here at Labour conference. One business exec, also a Labour member, told me he was losing his temper with the lack of backing for businesses and, for the first time in decades, reconsidering his party membership.
It’s not what he said - it’s what he didn’t. No pro-growth policy announcements, no warm words for businesses or entrepreneurs, no reassurances for jumpy business leaders.
In the aftermath of the speech Junior Ministers and MPs were dispatched to the various business events, roundtables and parties to churn out lines clearly supplied by HQ: the speech today was just the warm-up, the real action comes in Burnham’s speech.
For the most part, Labour has had a detrimental effect on particularly the most fast-growing businesses in Britain. They’ve dramatically raised the cost of hiring and made it significantly riskier by making it harder to get rid of bad employees. That’s also been a big and understated contributor to the problem of NEETs (people not in employment, education or training).
Businesses feel like they’re due a bung. They hope it’ll come in the Budget. It doesn’t seem likely to come today.
Don’t mention the … anything
The next twelve months will be defined by three things: AI, weather and war. AI will continue to develop at pace, there will be more hacks and they will be increasingly consequential. More jobs will be lost. Driven by El Nino and climate change, Britain will almost certainly see the most unpredictable 12 months of weather: prompting fears of food and grid stability. And of course, war will continue to rage in the Middle East, and Russia - as China circles Taiwan like a shark (and, bolstered by the chaos agents, small adversaries will try to trigger skirmishes in, for example, the Falklands).
Those three things are strangely absent from conference. They are mentioned in hushed tones, in sessions dedicated to health and social care or housebuilding. In one session focused on NHS innovation, panellists couldn’t help but opine on whether drones - perhaps vital to delivering blood or drugs to hospitals faster - might suddenly and mysteriously become harder to obtain in the near future.
Andy Burnham governs on vibes, so he ignores the ‘bad vibes’. Billboards across Liverpool beam out the Labour word of the week: “hope”.
But, as just about any executive will tell you, hope is not a strategy. Not an economic strategy, not a defence strategy, not a civic strategy. The government must learn this now, before it’s too late.