We are one month into Andy Burnham’s premiership, which is — clearly — not enough time to write anything of note about his achievements as prime minister.
What we can say is his ambitions are large.
On his first day in Downing Street, Burnham announced that his government had committed £340m to a programme intended to end long-term rough sleeping, with 1,200 homes and intensive support for at least 3,000 people.
Then came social care. He pledged to use all his political capital to finally tackle the elephant in the room, a system which has historically lurched from crisis to crisis, while calling for cross-party agreement on a lasting settlement.
He has pushed on devolution too, launching No.10 North as a symbolic first act to show his commitment to removing the concentration of power from Westminster. Burnham has made clear his focus on youth unemployment, and has promised more council housing and a government that would “invest in people’s success, rather than paying for failure”.
It is a remarkably coherent first pitch. After years of governments that seemed incapable of fixing anything, here is prime minister who believes government can and should tackle problems previously deemed beyond hope.
But of course, prime ministers do not get to choose what lands on their desk. The prisons crisis is a case in point. Burnham has already found himself dealing with the politically toxic question of early release, and while the political pressure to intervene in individual cases is understandable, doing so comes with immense risk.
If ministers begin creating bespoke exemptions for certain cases — particularly where names and faces become part of the political campaign — there is an obvious question about where that ends.
And then there are the problems he has not yet really begun to confront. Defence will demand decisions about Britain’s role in a much more dangerous world. Welfare and taxation will test the durability of Burnham’s promises. And immigration — an issue that arguably destroyed the last two prime ministers — will require more than managerialism.
And then there is climate change: a thus far glaring omission. As Burnham approached his first month in office, almost three-quarters of England is officially in drought, affecting around 45 million people. The country has endured repeated heatwaves, while the consequences are being felt in agriculture, water, wildlife and public health. Yet, climate has barely featured in the new prime minister’s agenda. That is a strange place for a supposedly transformative government to find itself.
The biggest challenges facing Britain don’t sit neatly inside the boundaries of domestic policy. Climate change, immigration and even Britain’s economic future are al tied to our relationship with the EU, the United States and the rest of the world.
Even the events in Thetford earlier this month — where anti-migrant protests descended into several nights of racist violence — are a reminder that the pressures facing Britain are not simply questions of administration and policy, but deeper rifts over national identity, social cohesion and Britain’s place in a changing world.
Burham’s great political strength has always been his instinct for the concrete: the roof over someone’s head, the care package that is not there, the young person who cannot find a job, the power that has been hoarded in Westminster. But a prime minister has to be able to see beyond the immediate problem too.
One month in, our King from the North has given us a pretty good idea of what he wants his premiership to be about. The question is whether he has yet demonstrated that he understands the full scale of the job. That is what we at The Lead are going to spend the coming months finding out.