It is easy, if not to say tempting, to be cynical about Andy Burnham.
To describe him as a machine politician with a missing moral core, the perfect fodder for lobbies; the politician whose inner thoughts no-one really knows: the man who has been whisked from Makerfield to Downing Street with a minimum of scrutiny, due process, or debate.
A man on a magic carpet.
Every instinct tells me not to take Burnham at face value. But that is not what I propose to do.
I am going to take Burnham at his word when he apologised for the Labour Party’s policy on Gaza. There is a lengthy list of consequences entailed in this apology, which I spend the rest of this column writing about.
