𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

There comes a time when every Prime Minister’s honeymoon draws to a close. Some happen sooner than others. Gordon Brown’s, for instance, was in the former category. Less than three months after being handed the reins from Tony Blair he allowed speculation to run riot that he would call a snap general election. He eventually backed down, with then-Tory leader David Cameron accusing him of “bottling” it. Those cheeky Conservatives even had beer bottles made up with a “Bottler Brown Ale” sticker on them to rub salt into the wound.

In fact, one of those bottles still sits on the shelf next to my desk in the Houses of Parliament! I’m not sure Liz Truss even had a honeymoon while Sir Keir Starmer’s was over within days of entering No 10 when he and Rachel Reeves made the treacherous decision to scrap the winter fuel allowance for pensioners.

He never recovered – a freebie scandal and a tax bomb budget that autumn adding to his early demise – and was finally turfed out of office less than two years following Andy Burnham’s coup earlier this year. I think we have now reached the moment when Burnham’s honeymoon has now come to an end.

He’s had a pretty good run of it so far. A well-timed beginning when parliament was on holiday for the summer enabled him to take his Tik-Tok roadshow around the country.

Policy announcements during that period were crowd-pleasing but relatively minor. He even came away relatively unscathed from his first meeting with Donald Trump in New York – although a U-turn over the Chagos Islands deal did little to shed accusations that he is “continuity Starmer”.

Labour conference in Liverpool this week was largely a Lefty Love-in as the party and its supporters celebrated their new messiah. I was in the main hall in a state of shock on Tuesday when Burnham declared war on not one, but two of the Express’s most sacred and successful crusades.

Firstly, he announced the end of the pension Triple Lock and then, for good measure, effectively said he was going to try and reverse Brexit.

Make no mistake, we will fight him all the way on both of these totemic issues and I suspect, which he even admits himself, he could pay the political price at the ballot box.

Just like his mentor Brown, Andy Burnham has faced mounting speculation that he is going to call a snap election. He too has denied it’s going to happen (I’ve already cleared a space on my shelf for a Bottler Burnham ale) but nobody in Westminster I’ve spoken to believes him.

After spending three days reporting on Labour’s lurch to the left on the Mersey it was refreshing to be back in Westminster. Especially so as I got the chance to interview Kemi Badenoch ahead of her own party’s conference which begins in Birmingham on Sunday.

As always, she was in very engaging form – albeit slightly under the weather with a cold – and after ploughing through my questions with gusto she even took part in a mini pub quiz, which you can watch here. For clarity, the Express is holding a pub quiz again at the Tory Party conference this year. Yours truly is writing the questions and I had to try out a few on someone!!

Kemi got four out of four correct. What was evidently clear from our 30 minutes together is that she’s well up for the fight with Burnham. It is back to the King of the North that I want to end this week’s Westminster Insider.

Perhaps the biggest story doing the rounds at the moment is the Manchester City scandal. The rows circulating around it are huge, and they are only going to get bigger and Burnham has allowed himself to become embroiled in it.

The Premier League has concluded that City “systematically broke Premier League Rules for nearly a decade”. This matters for the club, but that is just the start of it. It matters for Manchester, it matters for the Premier League and so, crucially, it matters for the UK’s image around the world – because England’s top flight is a colossal global brand.

Added to all of this, Andy Burnham pitches himself as Mr Manchester and is a big football fan. The man who was the mayor of Greater Manchester a matter of months ago is now the Prime Minister, and so finds himself caught up in it all at a local level, a national level and a diplomatic level.

His comments, in an interview with the BBC, followed by two attempts to backtrack 24 hours later, are his biggest self-inflicted tangle since he arrived in Downing Street in July. How ironic that a scandal involving his beloved Manchester has pretty much brought an end to his prime ministerial honeymoon.

I’m going to recharge my batteries for 24 hours before heading to Birmingham for the Tory party conference to see how their rebuilding project is going.