𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Andy Burnham isn’t even Prime Minister yet, and already he’s facing splits within his administration. The row focuses on who should be his Chancellor. But that’s only a proxy for a bigger fight – over whether Labour, and the Government of our country, should veer to the left under his leadership. For a while now, there have been rumours that Andy Burnham plans to make Ed Miliband his Chancellor. Mr Miliband is on the soft-left of the party, and certainly moved Labour leftwards when he was leader himself, between 2010 and 2015.

But he’s not popular with everyone. In particular, there are trade unions who are furious with Mr Miliband (even if the unions are pretty left-wing themselves) because they hold him responsible for killing off jobs in the fossil fuel industries, such as North Sea oil. So Mr Burnham has considered appointing Shabana Mahmood Chancellor instead.

She’s the Home Secretary leading controversial efforts to cut immigration and to make people already in this country wait longer for permanent residency status. This status allows them to claim benefits, so making them wait longer will save the Treasury money, she says.

But she’s seen as a right-winger within the Labour Party, and her tough immigration plans have upset many Labour MPs.

So there’s a backlash to the idea of her becoming Chancellor – even though Mr Burnham hasn’t even announced his pick yet.

Labour MP Rachael Maskell said: “I don’t think Shabana would be the right person for Chancellor. I do think Ed Miliband would be a suitable candidate.”

She added, in a Times Radio interview: “I do think he has got the skills and ability,experience to be able to drive forward a different agenda from Treasury, which is absolutely crucial, but also to push that out across the country as opposed to this real centralisation which has happened in the Treasury for decades upon decades.”

Other Labour MPs are less public, but complain behind the scenes that Ms Mahmood appears to have taken little interest in the economy in the past (although she has in fact been a shadow treasury minister).

That’s not the only problem. Some of Keir Starmer’s allies – and he does have a few – are angry at the way Mr Burnham, they feel, undermined Sir Keir, particularly after Mr Burnham’s ally Louise Haigh, the former transport secretary, revealed Mr Burnham had been planning for a year to become Prime Minister.

And it seems Mr Burnham has been encouraging backbench rebellions against Sir Keir’s government. Karl Turner, the ex-Labour MP who lost the whip after his outspoken criticism of Labour plans to curtail jury trials, told Times Radio: “He, I have to tell you, was encouraging me to oppose the jury trial curtailment because he thought it was a ludicrous idea like I did.”

Of course, it’s no secret that Labour is in a bad place today, despite winning a massive election victory just two years ago. If it wasn’t, Keir Starmer wouldn’t have been forced to resign.

And perhaps Mr Burnham will swan in to Number 10 and succeed in calming everyone down.

But it’s not starting well.