Andy Burnham should learn from David Cameron or his big plans are doomed to fail - Nigel Nelson

Mr Burnham should consider whether making No10 officials take a hike up north is really big enough an idea to capture the public imagination, writes GB News' senior political commentator

Mr Burnham should consider whether making No10 officials take a hike up north is really big enough an idea to capture the public imagination, writes GB News' senior political commentator

New Prime Ministers will always look at the record of previous ones for tips on how to do it. So, if Andy Burnham has any time between now and moving into No10 on July 20, he’ll be poring over the history books.

The obvious place to start is with Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, the only PMs to win three consecutive terms in office in the last 50 years.

Robert Walpole, William Pitt the Younger and the 2nd Earl of Liverpool also did but that’s going back a bit. Things have changed a lot since their day and they can safely be bypassed.

Thatcher and Blair both had big ideas to guide them, fundamental foundations for how they would govern.

In Thatcher’s case, it was her belief in free-wheeling free market economics to solve the nation’s ills. Blair had his Third Way nicked from Bill Clinton’s success across the Atlantic.

This meant abandoning traditional left-right politics and cherry-picking the best from each.

Until Blair popped up and created New Labour, the strength of the right lay in such things as robust defence, lower taxes and punishing crime, while the left scored on health, education and social welfare.

Slogans such as “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” encapsulated both ends of the spectrum.

Mr Burnham should consider whether the business-friendly socialism of Manchesterism and making No10 officials take a hike up north are really big enough ideas to capture the public imagination.

This is where David Cameron’s premiership could be instructive. The Conservative leader also had a big idea he called the Big Society. And as ideas go, it was a rather good one, but it never took off.

The plan was to make the state an enabler rather than a provider. Cameron wanted to bring back a sense of community to Britain, to get people into the idea that by looking after others we look after ourselves.

I was at the Tory conference (in Manchester ironically) where he outlined this vision, citing by way of example a project in the Midlands in which local residents got together to set up street patrols to drive out pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers “and turn what was a no-go zone into a desirable place to live.”

But delegates seemed to have no clue what he was on about, and I watched many simply fall asleep. The lesson for Mr Burnham is that big ideas are all very well but doomed to fail if they are not articulated skilfully.

But let’s not judge our incoming PM too harshly. He’s only made one big policy speech so far which was necessarily broad brush-stroke and there will be many more in the next three weeks.

The other thing Andy Burnham should not do is hold a General Election and risk the two-thirds Parliamentary majority he inherits, which gives him the muscle to bring about real change.

Reform is making the moral case for calling one, but this is hypocritical of them.

Mr Burnham has said he plans to stick to the fiscal rules in Labour’s 2024 manifesto and not to raise income tax, VAT or employee national insurance.

Only if he planned to tear those promises up should an election be on the cards. By contrast, none of the Tory MPs who defected to Reform were prepared to face by-elections.

They did rip up the manifesto pledges they were elected on and ignored the moral imperative to give their voters an opportunity to say whether they approved.