There is no situation room, no wall of flatscreens or a hotline to the White House, just a few chairs patrolled by ‘quite a mad dog’. But a garden in Golborne, on the outskirts of Wigan, is now ground zero in three different operations which will decide the future of Britain. The first is Op Makerfield, the campaign for Andy Burnham to win this week’s by-election. The second is Op Leadership, to line up Labour MPs, trade unions and donors for the showdown which may follow. The third is Op Transition, the plans to install a Burnham-led government.
‘Loads of it has been done in Andy’s garden,’ says a close ally. ‘Half of us in the garden, the other half online. We’re having to run a by-election campaign, a leadership campaign and preparations for government simultaneously. At the beginning Andy was rightly just focused on Makerfield. But as we’ve got closer, we’ve been carving out time to think beyond.’
Presiding over all three operations are the ‘northern Queens’ – former transport secretary Louise Haigh and Anneliese Midgley, the canny MP for Knowsley and a former political director for Unite – alongside Burnham’s longstanding aide Kevin Lee. Those who remember the exploits of Boris Johnson’s dog Dilyn will be delighted to know there is also a badly behaved hound. ‘Andy’s got quite a mad dog that has been disrupting proceedings on a very regular basis,’ a source reveals. ‘Lots of barking and hunting mice and he took quite a shine to Anneliese.’
