𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

I’m thinking of having tattooed across my forehead: “Andy Burnham: Not My Prime Minister.” Because he’s not mine. He’s not anyone’s. In fact, half of the county has no clue who the bloke in the black T-shirt with the Liverpool accent is. Because for the past nine years he’s been running what is, in effect, a local council in Manchester, yet incredibly that has qualified him to walk unchallenged through the doors of No. 10 on Monday as Prime Minister.

Burnham is the ‘Messiah with No Mandate’ who only got the job on the back of 24,000 votes from the people of Makerfield and because of the determination of Labour’s corrupt elite who saw to it that no one mounted a challenge against him. THAT isn’t democracy. That’s a bunch of arrogant, entitled Left-wingers thinking they know what’s best for the “idiot” electorate.

Why was there no leadership contest where voters could have seen Burnham and other candidates in action thrashing out their ideas? Or was that the point – not to see him in action before he was anointed because we’d have seen how indecisive, lacklustre and unimpressive he is? Because those of us who remember him in government know him to be all of those things.

And THAT’S the reason he’s been running scared of media interviews since Makerfield – in case we see that. He’s done just three – one with Victoria Derbyshire who tore him apart on the fiscal rules (he didn’t know them). They couldn’t chance another humiliation so he did a very tame one Andrew Marr who challenged him on nothing. And one with that colossus of political discourse, Gary Lineker, with whom he pushed home the message that, yes, he had called for a ceasefire in Gaza early on.

Big WOW! Does this man who has zero experience of foreign policy (I mean Burnham, not Lineker, although the latter has even less) imagine that if he’d called for a ceasefire back then Benjamin Netanyahu would have said “Okay, Andy lad. I’ll sort it.”

The effrontery of forcing Burnham upon us as PM is not only staggering, it’s an affront to democracy. He’s never had a proper job outside politics. He twice failed to make Labour leader because he simply wasn’t good enough. Half the country STILL doesn’t know who the Hell he is yet on Monday this greenhorn who’s been out of Westminster politics for nearly a decade will waltz into Downing Street to try and fix a Britain that’s on its knees.

His right-hand woman is convicted fraudster Louise Haigh, who was forced to resign from Starmer’s government but who will now be running the Cabinet Office and helping determine policy. And if he bows to pressure from the Left, the useless Ed Miliband will be Chancellor, a man who has already cost Britain billions with his lunatic net-zero policies. But Burnham still hasn’t announced his cabinet and there’s already unrest in Westminster about the lack of direction in his inner circle.

Everything we’ve heard him say since Makerfield has been a series of vacuous platitudes which mean nothing – “I’m going to do politics differently” and “I’ll have the courage to fix the big things politics has neglected”. Yes, Andy luv, but how and with what? There’s no money – a fact the IMF pointed out to him this week when it warned that Britain cannot afford a fresh spending binge and that he must concentrate on reducing the deficit.

But he’s ignoring that and is preparing to spend billions on devolution, a No. 10 in the North and nationalising Thames Water. Add that he’s already alienated huge sections of the electorate by making clear that the North is his priority and it’s not looking good.

It’s a democratic disgrace that ‘Blank Sheet’ Burnham gets to walk into No. 10 untested, untried and unchallenged. Because being a big shot in Manchester is a million miles away from commanding the national and international stage. And just as Burnham was incapable of it 11 years ago, he’s still incapable now.

I’d like to be wrong – but I fear I’m not.