Labour may have successfully blocked the mayor of Greater Manchester from running for parliament, but this definitely hasn’t solved their problems
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ome people call Andy Burnham Labour’s prince across the water and others call him the King of the North. Those are two pretty different symbolisms – the first referring to James Francis Edward Stuart, the exiled son of James II, the second referring to Robb Stark, and later Jon Snow, from Game of Thrones. Everyone on Team Starmer will be sticking with the Stuarts, since that whole saga was defined by fakery and flakery. Since the moment of his birth, there were rumours that James was an impostor. It was all a little bit convenient that, just as his father was about to be deposed, this heir would appear. If history had taught the era anything, it was that having sons could not possibly be that easy.
The Starks, by contrast, were known for honour, bravery and legitimacy, even the ones that were definitely illegitimate. The fact that they are also fictional is a side issue, really, given that none of these routes to power – commanding fealty, raising troops – has much to teach any pretender to Labour’s throne.
The rebel’s basic checklist is as follows: they need an absolutely minute knowledge of the party’s rulebook, yet at the same time, an understanding that the rule-based order is over. Item one in Labour lore used to be that, unlike the Conservatives, they found it more or less impossible to change the leader until he’d lost an election. If that was true even in opposition – which is where they normally are – it was so much truer while they were actually governing that it’s never really been worth examining other, lesser rules, such as “what’s the national executive committee (NEC) allowed to do again?”
