Katie Lam is a shadow Home Office minister and MP for Weald of Kent.
In the month between his victory in the Makerfield by-election and his accession to Number 10, Andy Burnham gave just one interview to the media – and that was to Gary Lineker.
Never has an incoming Prime Minister faced such little scrutiny. Throughout the by-election campaign, and during the sham ‘Labour leadership contest’, he refused to speak to journalists. Occasionally, he’d deign to make statements to let us know that he was ‘considering’ or ‘thinking about’ a particular policy, but he never saw fit to set out why he actually wanted to be Prime Minister.
His social media output, meanwhile, offered little but platitudes. We learned about how he takes his tea, but not about whether he plans to raise tax, or how he intends to stop illegal migration.
And his approach to Parliamentary scrutiny was even more contemptible. As Parliament prepared to break for the summer, the Conservatives asked that the House of Commons be allowed to sit for one more day – just one – so that we could scrutinise the incoming Prime Minister’s plans for government. Labour, on Burnham’s instructions, vetoed even that.
It means that, for the next month and a half, there will be no formal scrutiny of the new Prime Minister.
So, given that he refuses to set out his plans for government, we must judge Andy Burnham on his record.
As Health Secretary in 2009, he resisted holding a proper inquiry into the hundreds of excess deaths at Stafford Hospital. Despite committing to end rough sleeping in his first policy pledge as Prime Minister, the number of rough sleepers in Greater Manchester (where he first made such a promise) has just grown for the fourth year in a row. Since 2017, he was responsible for overseeing Greater Manchester Police – a force which was placed into special measures in 2020 after inspectors found that it had failed to record more than 80,000 crimes in a single year.
We can also judge him by the people that he’s chosen to surround himself with. To that end, we have Louise Haigh, one of Burnham’s closest confidants, who has just been appointed First Secretary of State. In November 2024, she resigned from Cabinet in disgrace after it was revealed that she was a convicted fraudster. While working for insurance provider Aviva, she was formally investigated by her employer after she claimed that company mobile phones had been stolen or gone missing “on repeated occasions“.
She’s now responsible for overseeing the Government’s ‘propriety and ethics’ brief.
Then there’s Ed Miliband. Not content with letting Miliband wreck our domestic energy sector and drive up bills for people across the country, Burnham has made him Foreign Secretary. He’s been replaced as Energy Secretary by Miatta Fahnbulleh, an even more zealous net zero backer than Miliband himself who has previously called for workers to be made the “dominant shareholders in every enterprise”.
Lucy Powell is back in Cabinet as Education Secretary, after being sacked in September 2025. That came after she dismissed concerns about rape and grooming gangs as a “dog whistle”. She’s joined by Angela Rayner, who was sacked at the same time for dodging tax on an £800,000 flat. Incredibly, Burnham thinks that a woman with a history of dodging property tax is the best person to take up the role of Housing Secretary.
And despite his efforts to present himself as a ‘fresh face’, Burnham himself is a creature of the political establishment. He first became a Member of Parliament when I was nine years old. He served in Gordon Brown’s cabinet, and he’s occupied some kind of elected office for a quarter of a century.
He inherits a country with the exact same problems that Keir Starmer faced, and he’s backed by the exact same Parliamentary Labour Party Starmer was. As far as we can see, his instincts on all of the big issues – on welfare, on immigration, on tax – are fundamentally the same as Starmer’s.
For all of the media excitement around the change of Prime Minister, Burnham looks set to offer more of the same. Though Starmer was an absolutely disastrous Prime Minister, the problem was not just his individual faults. The greater problem was, and is, that the Labour Party’s instincts on how best to fix the country are totally wrong. Burnham shares those instincts; he’s a Labour man through and through. Why should we expect him to perform any better than his disgraced predecessor?