Andy Burnham's big speech was short on hard answers and that should worry us all

“What a welcome!” Andy Burnham exclaimed as he took to the podium at the People's History Museum, greeted by whoops, cheers, and rapturous applause.

A cynic might say it’s easy to have that sort of welcome when you have packed the audience with friends, advisors, and MPs desperate for a Government job.

Journalists were relegated to the back two rows and forbidden from asking questions.

Burnham made mention of one of his old coats being on display in a glass case, alongside the infamous donkey jacket Michael Foot wore to the Cenotaph in 1981.

What the likely incoming Prime Minister did not mention, however, was that the museum had been in talks to acquire the infamous Ed Stone that former Labour leader and current Burnham confidant Ed Miliband unveiled at a pivotal moment in his disastrous 2015 General Election campaign.

The artefact was described variously as a tombstone, a headstone, or a millstone around his neck.

Whether Ed Miliband will be appointed as Burnham’s Chancellor is still unknown.

In fact, it was one of the very many unknowns Burnham did not address in his big speech today.

The very fact that no political anorak has the foggiest idea who Burnham’s Chancellor might be – and that it could be anyone from Wes Streeting on the right to Ed Miliband on the left – says a lot about how much of an unknown quantity our next Prime Minister is.

We did hear one overriding theme, however, today. And it bordered on the utopian.

“Westminster and Whitehall are set up for conflict, and they require radical change if the country is to get back on track," came the pitch.

That the system is “too adversarial” and the way to fix things is through more consensus.

But just look at what political consensus has delivered us in recent years.

The Climate Change Act (2008) was passed with just five votes against.

The Net Zero amendments to it passed the House of Commons after just six hours of debate without a vote, simply by acclamation.

Where we have had political consensus, we have lacked proper scrutiny.

We have lacked real politics. It’s a fantasy to suggest that arguments can be somehow done away with if we all hold hands and sing kum-ba-yah.

The reason we have democracy and politics in this country is because we disagree.

Politics is the art of disagreement. The purest essence of argument.

Banishing those arguments is not possible, practicable, or desirable.

Indeed, another big theme of the speech seemed to pull in the opposite direction.

Burnham promised to let “MPs be authentic representatives and not using the whip system to create fear or close down debate”.

So he wants more consensus, but more debate, too? It’s one or the other.

MPs are either local representatives who fight for their area above all or members of the national team who need to accept that difficult decisions must be taken for the good of the country – even if that means an angry postbag that week.

As with much of what Burnham announced today, this is at best a rushed flight of fancy and at worst a student politics wishlist that is about to smack head-first into the cold, hard reality of Government. Brace!