555. Burnham’s Cabinet Purge and the Rough Sleeping Pledge

Andy Burnham yesterday became the 7th UK Prime Minister within just over a decade. Surely he has to last longer than his predecessors if Britain is to rediscover its reputation for mature, serious politics. To do so requires two things above all, an agenda that makes life better for people and a team to deliver it. The team is becoming clearer with a pretty brutal purge of Starmer supporters and the appointment as Chancellor not Shabana Mahmood, not Ed Miliband as so many in the media said, but John Healey, whose resignation as Defence Secretary not long ago was a really big blow to Keir Starmer. And though it may yet lack detail, the agenda is becoming a little clearer as well. I for one am very pleased that his first big pledge was to end rough sleeping and today we have the promise of a cut to fuel bills. But the truth is, he faces much the same challenges as Keir Starmer did. So will Manchesterism transfer to the whole of the UK? Will the purge backfire? Will he and John Healey get the economy going? And what is Andy Burnham's worldview? This episode is powered by Fuse Energy. Right now Fuse Energy's tariffs are up to £200 below the Ofgem price cap, plus they've just launched a new referral offer that can bring your bill down even further. What I love is the simplicity of it. If you refer a friend, one of those few people who haven't heard about Fuse from us every week, and they switch both their gas and electricity, you each get £50 towards your next bill. So it starts with one conversation, no prize draws, no chance, no complicated reward scheme, just the power of one smart recommendation that rewards you both. And remember, energy prices are more volatile than ever, but don't wait for rates to spike again. Switch to Fuse in just three minutes and move to cheaper energy designed to help you and your friends cut bills. So don't just listen to another price cap story. 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To get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com slash restispolitics. The link is in the episode description. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify dash UK. Welcome to the Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. So Rory, we've got a new cabinet, finally. Actually, they were saying on the media that it took a long time. Having been involved in quite a lot of these reshuffles and cabinet appointments, I thought it was done pretty quickly, especially given the brutality of the early stages. Were you surprised how many got the chop? Yeah, I was. You know, it's something that you're right in the heart of and I was very much part of, but maybe not everybody follows. It's a very, very, very weird process. You were saying to me just before we came on that you would say to people, wait by your phone. And they could go on forever. Forever. I mean, I remember in 2015, having been a bit despairing about the reshuffles in 2012, 2014, where I waited by my phone and nothing had happened, 2015, I had left my phone on through the night. And I think it was like a sort of Sunday night that they started the reshuffle. And all I got was sort of telemarketing calls or texts from, I don't know, car companies. So I didn't sleep very well. Next night, same thing. So finally, I thought about, I guess, sort of four in the morning, okay, forget this. I'm obviously not getting something to reshuffle. So I switched off the ring, I went to bed, woke up at about 7.30 to find these frantic texts from everywhere saying, where are you? Get in here now. The Prime Minister wants to see you in Downing Street. So I pulled on my clothes, I rushed off to the train station, picked up a cappuccino on the way and then managed to pour the cappuccino all the way down my front on my way into Downing Street. I entered Downing Street sort of carrying a jacket like this, trying to conceal the amazing brown smudge all the way down. Anyway, that's just to say that yesterday I was talking to a number of Labour friends who were sitting there wondering what was happening, when it was going to happen, how painful it was going to be. And I'm afraid I kept being gloomy saying, you know, this could take days and I wouldn't count on it. And actually, to my delight, some of my friends did actually end up getting jobs and got them quicker than I thought. You know, it's a very difficult thing because it's like a sort of giant jigsaw puzzle. And it's obvious with the speed with which he did it that he'd worked out kind of who he wanted in the key jobs and how he was going to get them there. But so, for example, it's said that he offered Rachel Reeves a job other than Chancellor. And I've heard that was variously education or defence. I don't know if that's right. I wasn't there in the room. But the fact that he may have had her pencilled in for a job that wasn't Chancellor and she said no, that means you then got other pieces you have to move around. This can go on like all day. And then, of course, he's now appointing the ministers of state, junior ministers. And then you have the jigsaw gets even bigger. And don't forget, he doesn't know a lot of these people. So he's having other people say, no, for God's sake, don't put him there, don't put her there. And then he'll have the ministers themselves say, no, I don't want to work with her. I don't want to work with them. And so it can get very, very complicated. But I think he gave a sense of, you know, we've talked about his ruthlessness in relation to defenestrating Keir Starmer, and it was pretty ruthless yesterday. You know, Rachel Reeves, Chancellor gone, David Lamy, Deputy Prime Minister has been a senior Labour figure for a long, long time gone. Peter Kyle, Steve Reid, Liz Kendall, not just her gone, but her department gone. Science technology innovation is now getting put back into business. Aaron Jones, Prime Minister's right hand man gone, Attorney General Richard Hermer, Joe Stevens in Wales, Hilary Benn in Northern Ireland, James Murray in health, Nick Thomas Simmons. So there's a big purge this. Help us understand what's going wrong with these people that lost their jobs. So Peter Kyle, to remind people we interviewed on Leading, was a very, very whip smart, brilliant communicator who I thought had a real vision for business and the economy. Hilary Benn is a great orator, very, very impressive Labour figure who deeply appeals certainly to old fashioned, wet Tories like me. David Lamy, I think, has proved himself at lots of different levels and has been a big character in the Labour Party. And then there are people that maybe aren't household names, Nick Thomas Simmons or Darren Jones, who were considered very, very able, I think, technocratic, good administrators, Steve Reid, maybe James Murray. So some of these, you might have thought, are the future of the Labour Party. What's happened? Why this group gone? Because Andy Burnham wants to create a new cabinet, much more in his own image. Look, I agree. I think there are some of these people that you'd say have been and could easily have continued to be very good cabinet ministers. But it's more, I think, about the people that he wanted to bring in. And so in the end, you do have to cull to get in the people you want. Who would you miss of that little list I gave you? Who do you think were good and who do you think's the pity's gone? Well, I agree with you about David Lamy. I think David Lamy's been a big figure for a long time. I think he's got an appeal that goes beyond a lot of politicians. I agree with you about Peter Carr. I think he's a very effective minister. I, as you know, have said many times, I think that Nick Thomas-Simmons, to me, is one of those kind of very underrated politicians who is all about the detail. It's all about the work. And I think he's done a good job and he's sort of the grunt work trying to change our relations with the European Union. Interesting, his replacement, Hamish Faulkner, the Minister of State but attending cabinet. I think, I mean, you know, I can say both that I think Nick Thomas-Simmons was very good and I can see why he's put Hamish Faulkner in there to do the same job. And then some of the others, I think it's just a question of a little bit of politics maybe. There's no doubt he's doing everything at the moment to communicate a sense of recalibration towards the north and to the regions of England. So I think we now have seven members of the cabinet from the north-west of England. We have four from Yorkshire. We have, I think, two from the north-east and we have four from London and the south-east. Now that is a big recalibration. There may be a backlash to that at some point but people might start to think, hold on a minute, this Manchester thing has gone too far. You know, if you think about Angela Rayner's back in and Louise Haig back in, they are both, Louise Haig, Sheffield, Angela Rayner, Greater Manchester, they are both people who left the cabinet under something of a cloud, attached to sort of scandal. They've come back. And then the other one who's, of course, come back is Lucy Powell. I have to say, Lucy Powell, I thought my advisor on education, Miss Fiona Miller, I wasn't sure how she'd take to Lucy Powell but actually she's quite pleased because she thinks Lucy Powell is somebody who just is very dogged, very persistent, knows what she's about and thinks there is a bit of a problem in the education department with the kind of Gove Cummings people who are still in there kind of, you know, stopping the sort of reforms that maybe Andy Burnham will want to do. I think the other thing that, you know, the biggest appointment, the biggest sacking in a way, although as I say, she was offered a different job, is Rachel Reeves and John Healy coming in and that's a really interesting appointment. This is his chance for Dick Checker, so again for internationalists, John Healy is now coming in to the second biggest job in government and he's going to be running all the finances at a critical time when British growth has been slightly struggling, although there's been some slightly more positive data recently. Okay, back over to you, Rachel Reeves, John Healy. And again, John Healy, a Northern MP, South Yorkshire, as is Yvette Cooper, who's staying in the cabinet as Health Secretary. And I think what's interesting, and I think when you and I were talking about the runners and riders, and we should just say here, Rory, how many times have I said when you're reading about speculation, about cabinet reshuffles, most of the journalists haven't got a clue what they're talking about. And I'm afraid even the Financial Times, which recently has been saying as a fact, Shabana Mahmood will be the Chancellor. And I get the feeling that Andy Burnham has had this in mind for some time about John Healy. And I think there's two reasons. I think the first is John Healy's been around for a very long time and he worked in the Treasury as a minister under Gordon Brown. John Healy, I think, shares a lot of Andy Burnham's views about the Treasury. And I've been rereading the Andy Burnham, Steve Rutherford book, Head North, and there's a lot in there about how the real problem in this country is the way the Treasury operates. So he's sending somebody in to remodel the Treasury, and that's a big, big job. Hopefully, people will have a chance who aren't really focused on John Healy to catch up on the interview that he did with us on leading, which is a really good route into our new Chancellor. So this was, of course, the Defense Secretary and a really respected Defense Secretary who had tough acts to follow. People like Ben Wallace have been big figures, and Healy came in and really seemed to win the confidence of people. And not just won the confidence of people, I mean, he was very good at signaling intent on Russia, very good at working the NATO system, very good at working with the service chiefs, but ultimately very principled. He resigned over the cuts to defense. So we can expect significant increase, I mean, tens of billions of pounds increase, I guess, in defense spending, which will have effects on other parts of the budget. But he's also somebody who you described as the time as a really, well, I guess we get a sense of a real veteran, safe pair of hands. I mean, in this cabinet setup, you've got three very kind of up and coming bright young things from the 2024 intake coming in, Kanishka Narayan coming in at AI, Miasa Fandbula coming in at the environment. And as you say, Hamish Faulkner now attending the cabinets of the state and the Nick Thomas Simmons thing. But Healy represents the other end of things. He represents somebody who, I guess, is reassuring and who certainly people like me who think that we need tighter fiscal policy, tougher action on welfare, and probably a more business friendly environment will be a little bit reassured because he doesn't feel like somebody from the sort of, yeah, I don't know where you position the party, but certainly he feels like a kind of safe pair of hands and somebody who'd be fiscally responsible. Over to you. Yeah, I mean, I always got on well with John Healy back in the day, although he was always defined in the Blair Brown battles as a brown knight. And he was to some extent, but I'd say John is a post-factional. I don't think he likes the factionalism. I'm not sure he liked it back then, and there will be people feeling, I mean, I thought one of the, well, there've been two post-resignation slash sacking comments that are worth noting. The first is Steve Reid. Steve Reid was doing communities and as you said earlier, pretty effective, London, very close to Morgan McSweeney when Morgan McSweeney was Keir Starmer's chief of staff. And he said in his resignation letter to Andy Burnham, I hope those who did not show loyalty to Keir will now show it to you. And I think that was a bit of a dig, well, pretty obvious dig. So you could make the case. So for example, John Healy, who's now the chancellor, we said at the time we did an emergency podcast when he resigned. And I think we said there, this feels pretty fatal now. This was a really big blow because John wasn't coming, you didn't have a sense of John sitting there trying to undermine Keir Starmer. You had a sense of a guy trying to do the job, doing it well. So that was a big blow. So you've got him now chancellor, Ed Miliband, we know was the first pretty much to go to Keir Starmer face to face and say, this isn't working, you've got to go. We also know that Shabana Mahmood said the same thing. Now those three are now in the top two, the three top jobs. Yes, Ed Miliband, who was the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change has now become foreign secretary. And that's been quite interesting because in fact, there was a lot of talk about his brother, David Miliband, the former foreign secretary. That was always nonsense. Always nonsense. Okay. But anyway, a lot of journalists were excited about the idea that Dave Miliband would come back to do that job instead of which Ed Miliband. Now, interestingly, that was something that I was trying to hint out with you. So I'm afraid I've not been very polite about my views that I think Ed Miliband had become a little bit too rigid and a little bit too dug into his particular vision of energy climate change. And so I said to you, do you think he could be moved into one of the great offices of state? And what I meant by that was foreign secretary, and I was slightly horrified that you came back and said, well, I suppose Chancellor is a possibility because nothing would have terrified me more than Ed Miliband heading off to be chancellor. Foreign secretary I think is the right thing. I'd be interested in why Andy Burnham didn't. I mean, obviously the reason I'd be doing it is that I'd want Ed Miliband out of energy and climate change because I'd want to be able to do some things that Ed Miliband would oppose in terms of British energy. I'd want to build more data centers. In my case, I'd probably want to start drilling again in the North Sea, and I might want to show a bit of flexibility about some of his richer targets, but you don't want him as an enemy. So you make him foreign secretary so he can't do any harm. Now that again might annoy people in the foreign office because it implies that you're using the foreign secretary position as a way of managing party politics, but my sense is that that's why I would have done it. I'm not quite sure whether that's your understanding of why Andy Burnham's done it. First of all, when I was flying back from Iceland yesterday, and we should tell people that are leading into you next week is with the prime minister of Iceland about their upcoming EU referendum. And it's really good. It's one of my favorites thus far. And I was sitting on the plane next to a guy who was American, but living in Britain, and he was a very elderly gentleman. And I thought was going to be a bit Trumpy or what have you. And he was saying to me, he said to me, why are so few politicians really fighting on the climate crisis? And so I remain absolutely of the view that we have to take a leadership role on climate. So I hope that is not part of the reasoning. I was pleased that Ed Miliband mentioned relations with the European Union in his very, very first statement as a priority for how he saw the job. I have a more considerate view about this, which is actually that Andy Burnham was seeing this in everything he says. I mean, so yesterday he spoke to Trump, he spoke to Macron, he spoke to Zelensky, he spoke to von der Leyen, he spoke to others. They all kind of were putting out nice, welcoming words, as always is the case. But I think he does want to be less of a foreign policy prime minister than Keir Starmer was. Now, he may find that impossible. He'll certainly find it difficult. So I think the thinking may be actually, you know, Ed Miliband has been leader, he's pretty big figure. And I think that is more the reason why he's put him there. That being said, he may want to make changes on energy and the net zero policy. He couldn't do that when Ed Miliband was there, right? I'm actually surprised that Miliband took the job. You don't think it was possible, Fred, that he might have just dug his heels in and said, no, I've got this dream that I want to push ahead with energy and climate, and I'm not going to take the foreign secretary job. I think he's put 10 years into it, hasn't he? He has, yeah. But I think the other thing that foreign secretary gives you, particularly if you are a pretty big beast as he is, you have the ability to engage in debates where you actually have knowledge. I think he'd be worried, he might be worried. But let me tell you, I think it's interesting who Andy Burnham has replaced him with, which is Mehta Farnbulle. Now, she's a really interesting, really interesting woman. So she was born in 1979, I think, 1980, in Liberia. Her father was a foreign minister in Liberia, her mother, I think, was from Sierra Leone, and they fled Liberia during the Liberian Civil War in the mid-80s, came to England, they came as asylum seekers. I think quite a well-to-do family. I think we're back with a privately educated cabinet minister. She did PPE Oxford, as so many politicians do, then she got a PhD in economic development at the LSE. But she's got a lot of experience. One of her colleagues, who I know quite well, said that Mehta is the cleverest person in the PLP. She worked in the cabinet office on cities policy, she worked at the IPPR, she was chief executive of the New Economics Foundation. I've checked out her views on the climate crisis, Rory, she's what I would define as passionate and sound, okay? So that, let's just see where that goes. And she is one of, you said that, you know, she was literally just elected in 2024. So she's had, I think this is her third job. She is absolutely somebody who is a bit of a rising star. She's also, again, back to this big point, and it's why I think this book, Head North, I mean, people who want to know about Burnham, they've got to read this book, because it really does give you a sense of what he's about. And it's so interesting, as so much of the stuff he writes about in here is the stuff that you're hearing him say at the moment, rewiring Britain, regions and devolution. And also this thing about the Treasury green book, he's obsessed with this idea that the Treasury assessment of whether something's worth backing depends upon their assessment of whether it might work. Well, it's obviously going to work better in places that are already very affluent. So it works against deprived areas. And that's what he's going to tell Johnny, and he's got to change. So another really interesting appointment is that a new position has been created at the cabinet level for an AI minister, and he's given it to a man called Kanishka Narayan, who was the junior minister for AI previously in Liz Kendall's department. Now, Kanishka is, if you're looking for the new Labour Party and the brightest and the best, is a really remarkable person. I first came across him more than 10 years ago when he was one of the most brilliant civil servants. I guess he's only in his early 20s in DEFRA. He took over all our attempts to do open data. He was able to generate briefings and documents in sort of six, seven hours that took other people weeks to do. And this was before this was before ChatGPT? This before ChatGPT. He was himself an entire large language model. So he's only just been elected to parliament, came in, I think he's the first minority Asian candidate in the Vale of Glamorgan. So quite a sort of historic win. He came from Bihar in India, which was not a wealthy part of India when he was 12. He's got, as I say, a brain like a large frontier model. And he's become a minister now at the age of 36. So I'm really interested in that because there was a little group of very, very talented people who came in in 2024, of whom you're my friend, Georgia Gould, would be an example. Hamish Faulkner, who's now joining the cabinet. Al Kahn's, of course, that group, Torsten Bell, Josh McAllister, Mike Tapp, Lucy Rigby. And one of the things that I was watching here and with you watching is how much Andy Burnham was going to try to reach out to that new, very talented part of the Labour Party that just came in two years ago. So I'm very pleased to see three of them now attending cabinet. And they are, of course, you know, the ministerial appointments will also give us an indication of that because there is a sense in which the cabinet, I'll come back to Narayana in a minute, but there is a sense in which the cabinet has a slightly retro feel to it in some way. You know, the fact Angela Rayner back. Now, I love Angela Rayner and I know you do from our, not least from our leading interview, which is still, you know, right up there in our rankings. Lucy Powell, Lisa Nandy staying on at Culture. You've got Chris Bryant to Northern Ireland, Angela Eagle. I didn't see that one coming, Angela Eagle from Merseyside, who's gone in at Defra. So there is that sense. But then, as you say, this sense also of this new generation coming in. The thing about Narayana, Rory, I mentioned that Mathieu went to an independent school. So did he. But on a scholarship, he actually was living, I think, was raised in kind of, they weren't a rich family, as you say, and, you know, he grew up in a one bedroom flat in Cardiff. He then went to a local high school, but then he got a scholarship to Eton College. So we have, we have an Etonian, we have an Etonian there. But I think you were worried, I know you were worried because you said it both to me and you said it briefly on the podcast, you were worried that you felt Andy Burnham didn't get AI, didn't really understand why it was so significant. This suggests that he does. And that also he's prepared to appoint real specialists to roles. I mean, one of the things that was so distinctive about Cameron is that he didn't really often attempt to match people's knowledge and expertise to their roles. So he would bring in, you know, Philip Hammond, who was very bright, but he was made defense secretary without having much defense background, foreign secretary without doing much foreign the job. Michael Fallon, you could make the same case on defense. But in this case, when he was looking for an AI minister, he didn't think this is a way of putting in a labor member in order to manage the party. He really thought who is the person in my bench who knows more about AI than anyone on earth. And I pride myself knowing a little bit about AI, but I definitely defer to Kanishka. If I was looking for a real starman, I mean, that's almost like an American appointment. That's really bringing in one of the brightest people in the country to do that. There's one new cabinet appointment, which goes against that theory, because here's a little minor piece of history, which is making big waves in the legal press this morning. A lawyer friend of mine tells me, which is that Alex Norris, elected in 2017, also, by the way, born in Manchester, but a not a MMP, went to university there, but he's the first non-lawyer, I think, to be appointed to Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice. Michael Gove had that job. You're right. So, in which case, the legal press should bloody calm down. I think the first non-lawyer to get the job was Chris Grayling, who became Lord Chancellor in 2012. Oh, was he not a lawyer? Not a lawyer either. No. Okay. I'm going to demand a rebuttal in the, I can't remember which legal paper it was that sent me. But also, they're a husband and wife MP team. He's married to Emma Foody, who is the MP for Cramblington and Killingworth, so they're going to have a great time together. Now, he's in charge of prisons, and one of the sad things is that we lost Lord Thompson, who resigned very early on in the process, which is a great pity, particularly since we keep saying that one of the big problems in prisons is the prisons ministers never stay long. James Thompson had a really good tenure, and we'll point out that he was in there longer than me. I think he would have done the full two years, but it's still not very long, given that what we were hoping to do was really... Here's another thing that I want Andy Burnham to do that he hasn't done, which is to commit that people are not going to be reshuffled. I want people to feel they're in their job for a minimum of two years, unless there is some extraordinary scandal. There's a basic assumption that you're going to get the job for at least two years, and you can plan accordingly. Would you support me on that? Yeah, I'm totally with you on that, and I suspect most prime ministers will be with you on that, but I'm afraid that politics, particularly in the modern age, it's like J.D. Vance, when he said that Watergate today would be a kind of one-day wonder. In America, that may be the case, but if you think, and I think if you go back to Angela Rayner's stamp duty or Louise Hague, which was something to do with insurance on a phone that she'd lost, most American politics looked at us like, what is this about? Even Peter Mandelson, the Americans are saying, why is he resigning over this? We do have, I think, and I think it's good, by the way, we have different values to the Americans, which is just awful. Shout out here for our interview with regime change authors Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan on Leading Now. But I think that there will be, you just know there will be scandals, and the thing is about the way our media operates as well, is that these new names now that have come in, people will be looking to dig in and find stuff and what have you, but look, nobody wants to make change. I think the other question that is going to be interesting, we saw a little bit, I mentioned Steve Rhee's letter, but we've also seen this morning Darren Jones, who was the prime minister's first secretary prior to that chief secretary, who did a post last night saying, thank you and good night, see you in September, with a pint of beer in his hand, and yet was first out of the traps tweeting this morning, essentially saying, very pleased that Andy Burnham's going to be cutting VAT on fuel bills, however, where he says the money's coming from, scrapping this digital ID thing, it wasn't fully funded. Now that felt, that was a very deliberate move, basically to say, so that's him and Steve Rhee and now him basically saying, we're not just going to sit back and take this, we're going to, you know, we're going to be sniping from the sidelines. So whether it be coalesces around those sorts of people becomes oppositionist, don't underestimate though, Andy Burnham still has the big majority that Keir Starmer won for him two years ago. Well, let's take a quick break and then after the break, let's come back from the personalities into some of the policies and what we're beginning to sense in terms of where Andy Burnham might take the country. Great, see you then. This is a paid advertisement by BetterHelp. Even when people's views about therapy and mental health have changed, stigma can remain. Most of us would tell a friend or a loved one to seek support and we'd call doing that sensible, responsible, even brave. But following that advice ourselves can be harder, pride, habit, some awkwardness often get in the way. BetterHelp's 2026 state of stigma report surveyed 2000 Brits and found that 84% believe getting support is wise, yet 67% say society discourages people from doing so. The barrier is not just belief, but whether people feel able to take the same step they'd recommend to someone else, BetterHelp therapists are fully qualified in the UK and if the first match doesn't feel right, you can switch to a different therapist at any time. Don't let stigma stand in the way of support. Start therapy with BetterHelp. Sign up, get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash restpolitics. That's better, h-e-l-p.com slash restpolitics. Welcome back to the Restless Politics with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Now Rory, I was very, very, very, very happy that the one big policy announcement that Andy Burnham made on the steps of Downing Street was, he said, I'm going to go through that door and the first instruction I'm going to give is that we end rough sleeping. Now last, literally like three, four days before, Izzy from our newsletter and I, we went out with an outreach team from St. Mungo's charity. And I kept saying, I said to them, I said, listen, you guys, there's a real, there's a real opportunity with Andy Burnham because when he was mayor of Manchester, he made a big, big thing about rough sleeping and this is going to be a, you know, so you've really got to be making your case and, you know, and I can have a word or let's, you know, let's really put a campaign together. We'd done pretty much precisely nothing by way of doing that and then out he comes and says this. And I think it was, I think it also shows this consistency in him. There is a lot of the things he's been talking about in recent days, he's been talking about them for a long time. Yeah. Well, let's, let's just look at that one. Um, so I always thought it was something that was impressive because when I was running to be mayor of London, I said, I will get rid of rough sleeping and it's completely horrible. Right. We are, you know, we've got a lot of problems in the country, but we're a very wealthy country and there are people living in these terrible conditions on the streets. Furthermore, during COVID, we pretty much, uh, worked out how to get people off the streets and look after them. Uh, but the biggest argument I used against Sadiq Khan, who effectively kept saying, oh, it's all too difficult and it can't be done is no, that's not true. Andy Burnham has basically done it. Now there's a bit of quibbling around the edges around the numbers, but essentially Andy Burnham in Manchester really got to grips with the situation, proved it could be done. And my view was, which I think Burnham has too, which is if you can do it in Manchester, you can do it in London. Yeah. I mean, I think Manchester is an interesting story is, is that he came in and said he was going to do it. And I agree with you, by the way, I think it's an absolute blow on it and we shouldn't just imagine this is just in our big cities either, by the way, we've got rough sleeping right around the country and he brought in this thing called bed, the bed every night initiative and he got the numbers down to 89, which is, you know, that was a good, very good reduction. But then what happened, part, part of the problem that then saw the figures going up again was that there were people living, sleeping rough outside Manchester who thought, Oh, I'll go to Manchester. So the, the kind of the gross numbers went up and that eventually meant the net numbers went, went up as well. Then the other thing that happened, housing alliances were free, frozen, lots of evictions of asylum seekers became a really big problem. So I think he's now, but what he's trying to say is we've tried it locally, now let's try and do it nationally. And I've got to say, Roy, when Izzy and I were out the other night, it is just, they were everywhere. You know, you could find them everywhere. We're walking through this little park, we're talking to one guy who'd been, you know, sleeping rough for years and years and years. He'd lost five toes through frostbite on one foot and one toe on the other. He hated hospitals, didn't particularly want to live inside, but he obviously needed help and support. And then we're walking past him. We see this little white, it wasn't even a blanket. It was a guy sleeping inside a duvet cover, just the cover. And we kind of nudged him and he was an Afghan asylum seeker, 22. He'd lost, he had no papers, no phone, absolutely nothing. Even though it was the heat wave, he was free. It was really cold after a few hours, just sleeping on the ground. And it was just so moving to what this guy called Marco Costa from the charity, he just took so much time. He eventually got an, the guy's English wasn't good, he got a Pashto interpreter on the phone at whatever time in the morning it was, eventually got his story out to him. They got him to a shelter, shout out for Get Taxis, by the way. Black cabbies don't have a great ration, Get Taxis, their drivers are trained in safeguarding vulnerable people. And it was a Get driver that took this guy to one of the shelters to be assessed. And then of course, you're onto the next one. The other thing that was really quite shocking, again, you don't think of these things when you're not living that life, was that you think, well, at least when it's warm, they've got somewhere, it's not like freezing, but there were two problems. One is they need more water and they don't have water. And the second is, we saw one, the only woman we came across, her face was blistered through sunburn, absolutely sort of, you know, blistered because they don't have sun cream. So big shout out to St Mungo's, but also the other great housing charities around the place. But I thought it was interesting, powerful and symbolic that on the morning he became Prime Minister, he went to work with a housing charity and then later in the day announced, we're going to try and do this. Yeah. We should do more on this. I also think it's worth being thoughtful about the statistics. I remember going to one of the outer London boroughs, which was reporting that they had only six homeless people. And I spent the night in a church hall and there were, I reckon, 32 homeless people sleeping with me in that hall. So this is, and that's a church hall where they are allowed to come in, I think at about 11 at night and everybody has to be out by about 6.30 in the morning, the whole place has to be cleared. So we were all cleaning up in the morning. And it was very interesting, the disconnect between the officials saying there are six homeless people and my sitting there thinking, well, I'm surrounded by nearly 30 just in this building alone. But it can be done. I mean, it can be done. And I think what Andy did in Manchester was really inspiring. But also, as I say, what happened during COVID, I mean, fundamentally, it can be done. There's going to be something interesting, though, that you've also pointed to your story about the Afghan, which is, as Shabana Mahmood continues being tough on asylum seekers, what happens to asylum seekers who don't have housing and what are people who think we should be tough on asylum seekers going to think if we start providing shelter for asylum seekers? Yeah. Anyway, if you want a success story as well, the St. Mungo's have got these huge murals that have been... The one that we went to see was in Bethnal Green. And it had this thing, Lee was here in these giant letters, surrounded by pictures that told the story of his life. And we'll tell the story in this weekend's newsletter, because he was there to help them launch this new mural. It's a beautiful piece of work. We talked to him at this mural, which his story had inspired, and his story was borderline personality disorder, went to live in America, went to live in Canada, then moved to America, got married, mental health really, really struggling, couldn't afford to get mental health care in America, came back to Britain and found actually he couldn't get it here either. Tragedy, bad, scandal, needs to do more on mental health, and ended up being picked up on the streets, rough sleeping by St. Mungo's, and they've helped him get his life back on track. He's now written a play about the whole thing. So he's a wonderful guy to talk to and great stories. If you want to read Lee's story, get the newsletter, and you sign up to therestofhispolitics.com in the description to the episode. Which other policy areas do you want to talk about? Well, the next big announcement that he's made is that he's going to cut VAT on energy bills. And this is an interesting one, because it was one of these things that the Brexiteers had always campaigned for, because under EU rules, there's limits on what you can do on reducing VAT on energy bills. And one of the surprises that the Brexiteers kept coming up against is having claimed this is one of the great benefits of leaving the European Union, they never actually did it. Andy Burnham's now done it, and it relates to a couple of things. Firstly, it's going to cost a few hundred million. And as you say, interesting, Darren Jones has pointed out that scrapping the ID cards isn't actually saving any money, because they hadn't really funded the ID cards in the first place. But it's not a huge amount of money, 400, 500 million pounds, a lot of money, but in terms of the entire government budget, that's not the kind of stuff that people are going to be looking at when they're trying to work out whether Andy Burnham is fiscally responsible. It'll probably save, I guess, about 40 pounds on the average bill. But it does relate to the interview we did on meeting with the EU Commissioner, Dan Jorgensen, who points out that one of the things getting in the way of clean energy is the taxes. And we're trying to drive people towards using, relying on electricity rather than other forms of energy. And reducing the electricity bills is a sensible step in the right direction. I think that's great. There's a lot of questions around Number 10 North and, you know, this location in Manchester. Couple of things on that. One is just a logistics point. I mean, Tim Shipman and The Spectator wrote a long article speculating about whether Andy was going to be traveling up and down by helicopter or train and how people were going to get up to Manchester to do stuff. Which made it sound as though he sort of had an idea that people are going to be spending a lot of time in Manchester, in Number 10 Manchester, running this thing. But the other thing I was thinking about is how that's going to work with the rest of England. Because in Cumbria, certainly, our experience of being run from Manchester was not positive. We got very, very angry back in the day with Government Office North West, and we felt Manchester was a very long way from understanding Cumbria and our concerns. So I suppose this is a kind of challenge to Andy Burnham, and maybe this is a route back into his book, to really follow through with proper, proper devolution. And I think proper devolution is putting power down at the level of Cumbria, 500,000 people. Interestingly, we just did this interview, as you said, with the Prime Minister of Iceland, about the size of Iceland. And that's really what makes sense. Cumbria makes sense. Cumbria is a very, very unusual place. Couldn't be less like Manchester. It's not urban. It's extremely remote, rural stuff. So it would be a pity if devolution ended up with power being centered in places like Manchester rather than actually being driven down to the ground. I'm not talking down to the micro level of Eden District Council with 45,000 people, but at least half a million people. The other really, one of the many interesting points that I got from this reading Head North was his criticism of Scottish devolution to the extent that the Scottish government has centralized a lot of Scottish power. In other words, you have the Scottish Parliament, then suddenly you have one police force in Scotland, which we can argue whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it is more, if you like, more centralization. And so, and I think that the big surprise for me in the reshuffle, in the new appointments, is there wasn't, I thought there'd be somebody specific on this Number 10 North and devolution. Now it feels to me it's going to be a bit of Louise Hague, who's the first Secretary of State and right-hand person in the Cabinet Office. It's probably going to be a bit of Angela Rayner housing local government communities. It'll obviously be Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, et cetera, but I think that it's, I thought that would have been signaled much more because it's so clear to me that if there is a big idea coming out of Andy Burnham, it is about devolution of power. It is about really trying to get more power out into towns, cities, rural communities, the regions. In fact, the end of his book, he and Steve Rotherham have got this kind of this 10 point, they say, you know, these are the things we need to do. Written constitution. Well, give us the 10, yeah, give us the 10. Give me the 10 and then you can tell me what you think is so, right. Written constitution, written constitution. And he argues passionately why that's a good thing and I think we support that, but bloody hell how complicated would that be to, although back to Iceland, they almost did this through a citizens assembly type thing. Number two, basic law. This is my job, my job application. If you'd like someone to chair a commission on trying to bring together a constitution, I'm standing by, dear new prime minister. Oh God, you just never give up, do you? That peerage. You just never give up. I don't want a job. We could have a motto, disagree agreeably as we write a new constitution. We could share the commission on the new constitution, yeah, lovely. Number two, basic law. There's a lot of Germany in this book and the relationship between the federal center of government in Berlin and the lender. So all part of the same thing. Number three, not heard about much of this yet. Reform of the voting system, PR. Number four. And he seems to be serious about that because in a recent interview he said that his father who has dementia and who doesn't realize that he's become prime minister was the man that always tried to convince Andy of the merits of proportional representation. And he did say in one of the interviews, he wishes his father was able to know that he had convinced him and that he would be pushing ahead with PR. So let's hope he's serious about that. And that would be a huge change because it's very difficult for the turkeys to vote for Christmas. Well, and on which point, let's see, at the moment, the MPs seem to be welcoming Andy Burnham and liking a lot of the things he's saying and doing. On that one, I think there could be more of a fight. But then the next one, he's appointed Annalise Midgley as chief whip. Number four, removal of the whip in Parliament. Number five, a Senate, get rid of the House of Lords, hear, hear to that, a Senate of the nations and regions elected or appointed through list system by proportional representation. I quite like that. Six full devolution. We've talked about that. Seven equal paths in education. This is about much, much more focus on technical education. And he's done some of that in in Manchester, Grenfell law. This is about housing the Hillsborough law. Well, that's now been enacted. And again, back to this point about you just keep going on stuff, the extent to which both Andy Rotherham and Steve Rotherham in Liverpool, Merseyside, the extent to which their careers and their politics and their passions are driven by that one incident is absolutely extraordinary. And then number 10, net zero to reindustrialize the North. So that's about, you know, and by the way, you mentioned Dan Jurgensen, he sent me a paper this week. I've given up trying to get you back from the dark side, Roy, but he sent me a paper basically showing just how much cheaper it currently was to produce renewables and fossil fuels. I'll send it to you. You can have a read. Anyway, that is a huge agenda, an amazing agenda and a really interesting agenda. One of the weird things I feel with Andy Burnham is although he and I couldn't come from more different backgrounds, or even our approach was very different. He became a special advisor under Tessa Jowell, I think as early as 94 and didn't get into parliament till 2002. So he was very much part of the Labour machine as a special advisor for a very long time. And then he's a real veteran politician in some ways. But he ended up like me, and I feel this reading the book, feeling so much whenever he returned back to the constituency, a huge relief getting out of Westminster. He talks about the same thing I felt, getting off a train, breathing the air. And just how uncomfortable he felt with the whipping system, with the centralization of power and how much he believes that the genius of Britain is local. This is, of course, as usual, a chance for me to plug Middleland. But I'm interested in this because Middleland is about my trying to make a sort of Andy Burnham style argument that the book just coming out in paperback, live shows coming 13th, 14th September. Oh, for God's sake, that's three plugs in one episode, I mean, honestly. But the reason I think I'm intrigued by this is that my gut instinct as a member of parliament, which is what Middleland's all about, is that the things that worked best in Britain were at the more local level, that democracy worked better, that accountability worked better. I mean, I keep coming back to this obsession with the idea that a French mayor can kind of get poked in the chest when he goes to the local Mecole by somebody to actually say, why aren't you sorting this out? And the sense that you want to be responsible for things you can fix. So many of my constituents were interested in planning. They were interested in residence parking. They were interested in local schools. And these are things which I, as a member of parliament, didn't have power over. So there was a very weird thing of us putting out leaflets saying we were going to fix all these things when we didn't actually have a budget power to do it. People had the budget power to do it with the local councillors and nobody knew their names and the turnout in the local elections were very small. So fixing that stuff, and a sort of sense, I think, that he's drawing on the best of France and Germany here, which may be a little bit unfashionable, but definitely reflects also his idea on industrial policy, which is that industrial policy is best done for Manchester, from Manchester, or best done for Cumbria, from Cumbria. Because certainly at the local level, you really understand the texture of the type of industries you got, the type of skills you've got, the type of vocational skills that you need to match the industries that exist in this place. It's very place-based, isn't it? The other thing I think we should maybe just close off on is the, you said at the top, the world view. And if you think about, I mean, I can remember Tony Blair's first day as Prime Minister, there's an awful lot to do. But I got the sense that yesterday, Andy Burnham was doing a lot, he does a fit in the morning, he goes to see the King, he does a little speech outside No. 10, he goes in, he knows the buildings, there's no need for that, but then he does the old nuclear codes thing, and then he's appointed in the Cabinet. He's meanwhile taking all these phone calls. So he had this phone call with Trump, and if you remember when Andy was first sort of being talked of as leader, I think it was obvious he was going to become leader. And Trump's reaction was, oh yeah, he's a mayor of some town. Well Andy clearly remembered that because he said, I really hope to show you the delights of my city, Manchester, because we're going to hold the G20 there when we host it next year. But the American relationship is going to be important. I hope he doesn't do the kind of sycophant route, I hope he doesn't do the kowtow route, I hope that we're tough. I think I'll be fascinated to watch both Hexerth and West Streeting, who's the Defence Secretary, how that goes down, because West Streeting I don't think will take any of the bullshit. And then of course we've got Rubio and Ed Miliband. Now we are, it's always been for a long time, the junior partner they're in, but I think, I hope we don't take any of the nonsense and I hope we call out some of the nonsense. I am slightly worried about the drill, baby drill, North Sea thing, because I think this North Sea thing is a bit of a nonsense. As Dan Jorgensen said, if we're really going for energy in the North Sea, it's about investing in wind power there, because there is a lot of wind we can do. And as you said, I think you acknowledge now, it is about price and it is about taxes as much as all this thing about where we're getting energy from. Oh, well, no, I don't think I fully acknowledge that. We don't want to get dragged into the North Sea, but let's finish though with a sort of summary on Andy Burnham. So he's come in, so far, I think I'm right in saying he seems to be appealing. I mean, most of the sense that people have is he's a pretty decent person. We have a strong sense of his interest in localization, shaking up Westminster. Can he do it? I mean, I guess the thing I want to finish on is, can he deliver? Is he going to be tough and radical? I mean, if he really wants to bring a written constitution, radically devolve power, introduce proportional representation, completely remodel our state, he's going to have to make a lot of enemies. It's going to be very, very tough. And almost immediately, people are going to say, this is a distraction. Nobody cares about the stuff that's not top on the voters' priority list. And he's also going to have to still deal with the impossible problem of the Labour Party, which is, we're basically bust. There isn't any obvious source of money, and most of the sources of money that are proposed by people I certainly think are pretty irresponsible and don't really work. So he's going to have to manage a pretty tight financial ship with a Labour Party that still somehow thinks that the whole problem is beastly Tories and austerity, and a proper Labour government would be much more generous in a way that I don't think he can afford to be. Anyway, what's he going to do with those things? Look, I think he's shown, with the cabinet, and the route to becoming Prime Minister and defenestrating Keir Starmer, who I was glad to see when he left Downing Street yesterday, went for a drink, went for a pint with his mates. But I said, look, the truth is we don't know. But what we do know, and this is why I think this book is really worth rereading, is that he's had views about what is wrong with Britain, and in particular, what is wrong with our politics and the way that our politics works. So he's going to have his work cut out in terms of, he clearly, I think, wants to change the culture of government in a big way. Now that is hard, but I think that's where he's going to have to take a lot of the tough stuff. I think that is why he has put Healy into the Treasury. This Green Book thing, we should maybe do an episode later on, on the Green Book and how it works. And then we've got to see whether he can just manage the sheer volume of stuff that is going to be coming at him. But it's interesting to me, I'm just looking at the media monitoring thing of the front pages, up till now, the right wing papers have basically been trying to take shots at him the whole time. It's interesting, a slightly different tone today. The Daily Telegraph headline, Burnham pins hope on Healy, and rather a flattering picture of him on the front page, which is, and then even the Daily Mail, which of course hates anybody who's not a sort of, you know, out-and-out right winger, they've got their little Messiah without a mandate blob up by their thing, but they're not really sort of screaming that. And the main, this picture of him with his hands together, and the front page headline is let's pray he knows what he's doing. On his first day as PM, Burnham vowed the biggest political changes for 40 years, refused to rule out yet more tax hikes. The old Daily Mail would have said, your taxes are going up, put a convicted fraudster in charge of his leftist agenda, that's Louise Hague and her phones, and made Ed Miliband Foreign Secretary, thankfully not Chancellor. For the Daily Mail, that is really, really, really, really tame. And likewise, the Daily Express, which is, you know, basically Farage fanzine, let's hear how you will bring back hope then, Andy. In other words, not totally putting the boot in yet. Now, he won't have a very long honeymoon, that's just, I'm afraid, the way of the modern age. But I think he, I think you're right, I think people feel he's come in, he's got a lot on his plate and he's started pretty well. So there we are. Yeah, I've got to say, Roy, he's vying for some of the front page on the tabloids with the death of Kevin Keegan. Now, Kevin Keegan, there's a lot we could say about Kevin Keegan, great footballer, first British player to play in the Bundesliga, beloved in Germany as well as England, England manager, manager of Newcastle, legend in Liverpool. But also, I think when he died, as he did yesterday, Kevin Keegan, they showed the Tony Blair head tennis thing. I think when Tony Blair dies, that will be shown as well because it was the greatest photo call we ever did. And we thank Kevin Keegan for that and very much more. Brilliant. Well, 17% famously of Andy Burnham's posts so far have been about football. So you've got a lot in common with him with your love of football and music. Much more to come back to with our new Prime Minister. We've done a lot on appointments. We've begun to sketch out some of the strategy, got into a bit of the devolution, much more to learn about his economic policies in the days to come from John Healy. Thank you very much and look forward to continuing in Question Time. And Roy, why don't you just put the listeners out of their misery and tell them what we're going to talk about in Question Time because they're going to be shocked by what you want to talk about most. Well, OK, so I'm afraid we're coming back to AI, but we're coming back to it from a very exciting direction, which is China has just released an extraordinary new record-breaking frontier model and announced an amazing new international organization around AI, which has stolen a march on the US in two ways. Really interesting example of China's new soft power and hard power coming into operation. That and much more to come in Question Time. Yeah, we're going to do Zelensky and some of his troubles and we're going to do Kemi Badenock kicking out a few of Rory Stewart-type Tories from her party. See you then. See you then.