Andy Burnham has suggested that Sir Keir Starmer has no plan to turn the country around in an attack on the prime minister before the Labour conference this weekend.
The mayor of Greater Manchester said that Labour was being run in a “very factional and quite divisive” way as he opened the door to a return to Westminster and a potential leadership challenge.
He also said the party should adopt a policy of “rolling back the 1980s” by bringing housing, energy and water companies back into public control, which would ease the cost of living crisis and be popular with voters.
His comments, in an interview with the New Statesman, will alarm Downing Street. There are fears that Burnham will use the conference, which starts on Sunday in Liverpool, to undermine Starmer and make a pitch to replace him.
Burnham said: “To me, the issue of the conference is not who is the deputy leader of the party, who is the leader of the Labour Party. The issue for the conference is: where is our plan to turn the country around? This kind of challenge we’ve got in front of us cannot be met by a very factional and quite divisive running of the Labour Party.”
