Working people get no say on seventh PM
Burnham takes No 10 with no public vote as market pressure over Ed Miliband hands the Treasury to Shabana Mahmood.
Andy Burnham is confirmed as Labour leader today, and prime minister on Monday, without a single vote from the public or from Labour’s own members deciding it.
He becomes the seventh prime minister in a decade, and the second in three years to walk into Downing Street on the strength of a parliamentary head count alone. Nominations closed on Thursday with more than 90% of the Parliamentary Labour Party behind him, 322 of 403 MPs on the first day. No rival MP got close to the signatures needed to force a contest. There was no leadership ballot. There will be no general election either: asked directly on 3 July whether he would call one, Burnham said no, and confirmed he would govern on Labour’s 2024 manifesto until 2029.
Burnham eyes Labour leader route through MPs, not voters Burnham’s route to the top job began in May, when Josh Simons resigned as MP for Makerfield to clear him a seat. Burnham won the resulting by-election on 18 June with a majority over 9,200. Keir Starmer resigned as leader on 22 June after losing the confidence of his own MPs. What followed was not a contest but a coronation: a leadership machine, built on MPs, six of Labour’s affiliated trade unions and donor networks, that closed off any challenge before members had a say.
Supporters call this constitutionally normal. Britain elects a Parliament, not a president, and Gordon Brown, Theresa May and Rishi Sunak all took the job the same way. That is true as far as it goes. It was also Starmer’s own argument, in 2022, that a prime minister installed without a public mandate lacked the authority to govern. His party has just done it to itself for a second time.
A chancellor picked by the pound
The appointment that mattered more to the markets than to voters was settled in the same 48 hours. Burnham’s allies blocked Ed Miliband from the Treasury after Sadiq Khan privately lobbied for him, and lined up Shabana Mahmood instead. Mahmood has no economic record: the Home Office logged no meetings between her and individual businesses during her time there. What she does have, in the City’s own words, is that she is “to the right of the Labour party” and, as one strategist put it, simply “not Ed.”
The market told you what it thought of the choice. On the Mahmood reports, the pound jumped to a one-year high near $1.35, and gilts outperformed eurozone peers as investors cut what they call the “political risk premium” on UK assets.
That premium is the working people of this country, and the risk was ever having a say. The pound got a vote. Nobody else did.
