Each new prime minister is a reaction to the last: Boris Johnson was the chaotic and colourful response to Theresa May, David Cameron the smooth reaction to Gordon Brown – who was himself the heavyweight, brooding solution to Tony Blair’s spin and megawatt smile. Andy Burnham’s humanity and emotion are the perfect contrast to Keir Starmer’s inability to muster a personality or a lasting policy that anyone liked. But quite often those qualities that contrast the most with a leader’s predecessor end up being part of their own downfall too. We might already be seeing that with Burnham.
This week, after spending the summer “turning over every single stone” to work out how to prevent two of the killers of PC Andrew Harper from being eligible for the early release scheme, Burnham announced he had come up with a way of keeping them in prison. Anyone convicted of manslaughter will now be excluded from early release. Initially, the Prime Minister said he had pushed to the very limits of what he could do when he made some modest tweaks to Starmer’s criteria for early release. He had expressed frustration that he couldn’t go further, and for about 24 hours ministers were sent out to argue that their hands were tied in the case of Harper’s killers, and it looked like they would be released early. Now, they’ve found a way of undoing those knots – though the consequence of keeping all criminals with manslaughter convictions inside will be quite profound for the overcrowded prison system.
