𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Coronations are for royalty but not for politicians – not even Labour royalty. It will be bad for Labour, bad for the country and bad for Andy Burnham himself if he is handed the keys to Downing Street without first going through a leadership contest.

Ipsos polling this month found only 13% of Britons – and just 13% of 2024 Labour voters – wanted Mr Burnham to take over without a contest. This would reek of the worst type of entitlement, with a lifelong Labour insider who has just arrived in Parliament being handed the most powerful job in the country. Mr Burnham will arrive in Downing Street as a stronger prime minister if he goes through a competition. This is a chance for him to set out his vision and win a mandate to break with the Starmer-Reeves era.

If Labour needs convincing why it is worth going through the palaver of a contest, MPs should look at the careers of Gordon Brown and Theresa May.

Mr Brown won 313 nominations, with Left-winger John McDonnell unable to get the backing of enough MPs to trigger a formal race. The former Chancellor missed out on the chance to set out fresh ideas, win support for a new strategy and secure his own mandate. His Government soon looked dog-tired. When he ducked out of early election this sent the signal he knew he did not have the backing of the country.

Mr Burnham will find being PM a miserable experience if voters see him as an emergency replacement to Sir Keir Starmer who has been brought in to run down the clock until an inevitable drubbing in a general election. The danger is that every time he takes a mis-step, ordinary Britons and Labour MPs alike will mutter: “I never voted for him.”

Opposition MPs will jump at every chance to claim he is only in power because of an internal Labour stitch-up, that he lacks legitimacy and it is time for a general election.

Likewise, Andrea Leadsom did the Conservative party no favours when she pulled out of the July 2016 election contest and cleared the way for now-Baroness May to be installed in Downing Street. A campaign would have forced the longstanding Home Secretary to spell out what she meant with her vacuous statement that “Brexit means Brexit”. She became PM without a clear mandate for the deal she would pursue with Brussels and years of Brexit wars ensued.

The party missed out on the chance to assess her skills as a nationwide campaigner, which would be disastrously exposed in the 2017 election which saw support for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour surge. Stuart Fox, a politics expert at the University of Exeter, summed it up like this: “The path to Number 10 appears largely clear for Andy Burnham. This should worry the Labour party.

“Recent Prime Ministers, such as Theresa May and Gordon Brown, entered office effectively unopposed but were less prepared than expected. Weaknesses – like May’s difficulty managing MPs or Brown’s lack of a clear policy direction to move on from the Blair years – only became fully apparent once they were in government and very difficult to remove. A leadership contest might have exposed them earlier.”

Mr Burnham – who has just won an emphatic victory in Leave-voting Makerfield and will not face a challenge from the energetic Wes Streeting – has little to fear from spending a few weeks on the campaign trail. This would give him a chance to introduce himself to citizens who have not paid much attention to his tenure as Mayor of Greater Manchester.

There is goodwill to build upon. More than a third of the country think he will do a good job as PM (35%) – more than say the same for Kemi Badenoch (29%), Nigel Farage (27%), Sir Ed Davey (20%) or Zack Polanski (17%).

The biggest danger for Mr Burnham is not that he loses but that in trying to win over the Labour membership and the trade unions he rules out welfare reform or commits to hikes in spending which will frighten the markets.

But in a democracy it is right that an aspiring PM faces questions from the people of Britain before moving into Number 10 and issuing instructions to submarine commanders about what to do in the event of a nuclear apocalypse. Mr Burnham will need to win over the country at the next general election and it would do him no harm to get some practice in early.