Things can only get better.

As Andy Burnham formally becomes Labour leader, I signed off on our Lowick Hedry transition Lowdown series (pasted below). If you’d like to sign up to our new weekly Lowdown email just click here.

Things can only get better

Good morning,

The Labour leadership contest wrapped up last night, with the close of nominations for the party’s affiliates (trade unions and socialist societies). Andy Burnham ended up being nominated by 379 Labour MPs and most trade unions.

So at midday today, at the TUC building near Tottenham Court Road, Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee (NEC) will convene a ‘special conference’ to formally declare Andy Burnham as the leader of the Labour Party. The NEC’s chair, one Shabana Mahmood, will likely front proceedings, along with the party’s outgoing General Secretary, Hollie Ridley. 

The location is quite poignant for me, as it it was at the TUC in the wake of Labour’s General Election defeat in 2015 that I helped set up a media round for Andy Burnham’s nascent leadership campaign. I’m often asked, perhaps with some surprise, why I back Andy in 2015 so I thought I’d take the opportunity to share some personal thoughts this morning on the man who is to be our next Prime Minister. 

I stood for parliament in the marginal seat of Northampton South in 2015. After a gruelling 18-month campaign, many of my team were quietly hopeful that Labour would pull it off. The response on the doorstep had been positive. Our strategy of squeezing the LibDem vote appeared to be working. And I faced an unpopular Conservative opponent. 

But I knew, deep down, that it wasn’t going to be. Why? I knew from the thousands of conversations I’d had that most people just couldn’t see Ed Miliband as Prime Minister. And despite the harshness of austerity, swing voters (critical in a seat and town like Northampton) were broadly comfortable with David Cameron and George Osborne. 

It wasn’t just personality, of course. There were policy issues which were bubbling away which Labour under Ed had been tone deaf to. On economics, the language of the politics of envy had seeped into elements of the debate in the party, which turned off many voters (and me), and in retrospect had clearly paved the way for Jeremy Corbyn. The EU too was an issue and on my patch Ukip had a strong campaign. I could see, and hear, that they were taking votes from us across the constituency, not just the Tories, which was ignored by Ed Miliband when I regularly reported back. Labour’s base was fracturing and Ed was ignoring it.

And then there was immigration. The spectre of Gordon Brown’s ‘bigoted woman’ comment from the 2010 election still loomed large over Labour. Our activists, well intentioned, but broadly from public sector and academic backgrounds, recoiled from doorstep conversations about immigration concerns. And then the voters recoiled from us.

My route into Labour politics came through Labour Students, from the local club at Durham through to finishing up on the National Executive. Core to Labour’s campaign machine, Labour Students was ultra loyal to the Blair premiership. We learned the key skill of emulating clapping seals early in our time, wheeled out to cheer the arrival of Tony at whatever set piece event was set up for broadcast. We were rewarded with thank you drinks at No10 and, for many, jobs post-graduation in government. Dissent, or indeed any questioning of policy, was not tolerated. Yes, we were allowed performative protest on university tuition fees, but broadly everyone stayed in line. When the Iraq war happened, opposition was frowned upon. The issue led me and my longtime friend from those days, Wes Streeting, to nearly leave the party.

It was in that historical context that most people who had come up through the Labour Students route tucked in behind Liz Kendall in the 2015 leadership race. She was ‘our candidate.’ Except my experience in Northampton suggested otherwise. 

Andy Burnham phoned round marginal seat candidates who lost – and I think he was the only one. I remember the call. He asked why I thought I’d lost. I talked about Ed’s credibility, public services, tax and immigration. Andy agreed with me that we had a problem with listening to the public (and many members) on immigration and I was heartened to hear about his commitment to ensuring that he’d always test his views against the ‘Westminster bubble’ – the forerunner to today’s ‘Makerfield test.’

There had been early lines briefed in the 2015 leadership campaign that Andy Burnham was ‘problematic’ on LGBT issues. There was a suggestion that I’d been single out as a target for Andy’s support as an openly gay candidate to help ‘pink-wash’ his campaign. My sister, who was going through fertility treatment at the time, challenged me on why Andy had spoken against lesbian fertility rights on the NHS at Shadow Cabinet. I spoke to Andy about all these concerns before joining his campaign. It wasn’t just the reassuring answers he’d given, but the way in which he listened and reflected on what I’d said. This was a man who listened and had a strong sense of empathy. And on the substance, he said he wasn’t anti-fertility rights, but that his comments had been twisted due to concerns raised from a religious perspective. Andy is a quiet Catholic, I’m a quiet Anglican (as is Wes), so we understand these tensions.

The leadership campaign was brutal. We saw quite early on from our own numbers that Jermey Corbyn was going to win. Andy knew. And he went out everyday and put on a brave face. I remember driving to Birmingham with him and Kevin Lee when we got some phone canvass returns in. Andy turned and said “we’ve lost, haven’t we?” I just nodded. The campaign didn’t get negative, Andy just pressed on. That was a good six weeks before the actual result.

I didn’t know Keir Starmer very well. I have no measure of the man. But I do know Andy Burnham. Who I saw in private is who you see in public. Someone committed to making the world around him a better place. Someone who listens, someone who seeks to build consensus. And someone with a strong sense of fairness. 

This the the last Lowdown email. I hope you’ve found my morning emails useful. My partner won’t let me carry on writing them as the dog barks when I get up at 5am. But if you’re interested in receiving a weekly email from us at Lowick Hedry, just reply and let me know.

Things can only get better.

You can also watch me discuss this and more on this week’s episode of Political Business, available wherever you get your podcast and on YouTube: