Andy Burnham is not prime minister yet, but he has already outdone John Major. Whoever thought of putting him in a grey outfit against the backdrop of a grey door for this morning’s speech in Manchester certainly wasn’t thinking of injecting a bit of colour into national life. It was like watching Harold Wilson: the last PM before colour TV was introduced to Britain.
Burnham’s big mission for the country – to devolve power to the regions and localities – also wasn’t exactly calculated to set pulses racing. Rightly or wrongly, few things can be relied upon to provoke a yawn in British life than local government. Just look at the turnout in local elections and the increasing tendency for the electorate to use them as little more than a referendum on national government. It was, after all, the local elections which finally did for Keir Starmer and put Burnham in the position he is now.
It was like listening to Harold Wilson, back in the days before council blocks became a symbol of urban decay
If Burnham can really make the British public excited about local government, he will have achieved something genuinely impressive, but I would say he has an uphill task. However much the new MP for Makerfield might feel that the people of Manchester are behind him, the wider electorate has signalled again and again that they are not very keen on the idea of devolving power to the regions or the districts. Since 2001, there have been 55 referendums on whether to introduce an elected mayor, and in 38 of them the idea was rejected. In four of the 17 cases where the public did vote for an elected mayoralty, the post was later abolished in a subsequent referendum.
