𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Labour PMs have been particularly prone to career-defining gaffes, and Burnham risks adding his name to a long and ignoble rollcall. For ‘Sunny’ Jim Callaghan in the 1970s, it was the “Crisis? What crisis?” newspaper headline after he returned from a Caribbean summit in the middle of the Winter of Discontent. Those weren’t his exact words, but revealed an out-of-touch leader who couldn’t see the chaos unfolding around him.

Tony Blair’s “I’m a pretty straight sort of guy” line still makes the skin crawl, while successor Gordon Brown sank his 2010 election campaign with his outrageous “bigoted woman” jibe. Sometimes actions speaker louder than words, such as Ed Miliband’s mangling of a bacon sandwich during the 2015 general election, and Keir Starmer trousering £100,000 of freebies then cutting the winter fuel payment for pensioners.

Burnham looked sure-footed in his first few weeks, especially compared with his leaden predecessor, but a pattern is now emerging. He has a habit of telling people what they want to hear, even when it contradicts what he said yesterday. He’s a people pleaser. That can be a useful quality in a leadership hopeful climbing the ladder, but is turning out to be a liability in power.

During the Makerfield by-election, Burnham promised local voters that he wouldn’t “re-run” the Brexit debate, warning that Britain would remain stuck in a permanent rut if we kept arguing about them. His focus, he insisted, would be relentlessly domestic. In power, he’s been unable to shut up about it, banging on about closer integration with the EU and refusing to rule out rejoining.

He’s gone back on his word and casually reopened the most divisive UK political debate of the millennium . Any move towards rejoining would risk tearing the country apart all over again.

This week, he blundered into even murkier territory by floating conspiracy theories about Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum, deliberately cingast doubt on the legitimacy of the result and insulting the 17.4 million people who voted Leave for being Russian dupes. Even the head of MI5 couldn’t believe his ears, and slapped him down. But what if the PM hasn’t lost the plot at all, and knows exactly what he’s doing.

Burnham has a good reason to bang on about Brexit. He wants Green Party and Liberal Democrat voters to know he’s on their side. He understands their hostility to Brexit, their appetite for more public spending, their enthusiasm for nationalisation, and tells them what they want to hear.

But he’s also slapdash, because lately Burnham seems to put his foot in it almost every time he opens his mouth.

He’s had to walk back a host of comments, dropping plans to allow drinking at football matches, pledging to help Manchester City’s owners before conceding that no team was “above the rules”, and claiming that funding social security was more important than defending the country.

Now he’s stumbled again, by declaring an individual “responsible for the murder” of former Conservative minister and Reform UK spokeswoman Ann Widdecombe, before the courts had established guilt, trampling over the well-established presumption of innocence.

So far, Burnham’s charm has allowed him to get away with it. But loose talk has consequences. He can’t keep promising different things to different people, then beating a humiliating retreat. Soon people will stop believing anything he says.

We haven’t had that career-killing gaffe yet. But if Burnham keeps firing off like a loose cannon, he’ll soon be added to that infamous list of PM blunders. And when it comes, it won’t just blow up his own career. We’ll all be left to pick up the pieces.