One can picture it all too vividly, that peculiar British ritual of the first flush of enthusiasm, when the new man in charge arrives like a provincial impresario determined to show the punters a good time. Andy Burnham, ascended to the highest office after the revolving door of Downing Street spun once more, has taken the country out for what promises to be a wild night. Early on, the flashy creature is in splendid form: splashing the cash, buying flowers for the table, paying for the taxi, and standing the first round with the confident air of a man who has just discovered that public money smells sweeter when it is being spent on other people’s problems.
A VAT cut here, a bus-fare cap there, the warm glow of re-industrialisation promises and council houses rising like optimistic mushrooms after rain. One almost expects a violinist to appear at the elbow, playing something suitably sentimental from the North. Yet even as the evening sparkles, the attentive observer feels the first faint tremor of unease. The menu is extensive, the talk expansive, but the bill, one suspects, is being prepared in a back room by accountants whose faces grow longer with every round. We have been here before, of course.
British politics has a habit of producing suitors who arrive with pockets apparently full and depart with the quiet dignity of men who have remembered a prior engagement elsewhere. Mr Burnham’s Labour, having shuffled off the mortal coil of its immediate predecessor, now finds itself in that dangerous honeymoon period where announcements substitute for arithmetic and good intentions are presented as a fiscal strategy in themselves. The cancellation of one vanity project funds another; a modest saving on digital ID schemes is paraded as evidence of prudence, while the larger structural gaps—defence, demography, the creaking machinery of the welfare state—loom like uninvited guests at the feast.
While the nation is being treated to this agreeable spree, the polling numbers have taken on a most inconvenient clarity. Labour, that ancient vehicle of working-class aspiration now repurposed as a managerial concern with a keen eye for focus groups, has closed the gap on Reform. One might have thought the electorate, having sampled various flavours of disappointment in recent years, would have developed a certain immunity to the old routines. Yet here we are: Reform, with its blunt talk of borders, burdens, and bureaucratic excess, suddenly finds itself staring across a narrowing chasm at a Labour Party that has rediscovered the virtues of sounding purposeful.
The gap closes not because the electorate has been swept off its feet by sudden genius, but because memory is short and the alternative always looks shinier under the right lighting. Here is a government promising to rewire the nation while still operating on the same frayed extension lead of Treasury forecasts, ministers talking of ten-year plans with the breezy confidence of those who know they will not be around to implement the last five. And here, most deliciously, is the public—those long-suffering diners at the table—nodding along, flowers in hand, quietly calculating how much the evening is really going to cost when the sobering light of morning arrives.
One does not wish to be churlish. There is something almost touching in the spectacle of a new Prime Minister attempting to buy a little breathing space for a country feeling the pinch. The flowers are welcome, the first drink a kindness. Yet the concern remains, dry as dust and sharp as the morning after: when the bill comes, as it always does, the question will not be whether Andy can pay it, but whether the rest of us will be left washing dishes in the kitchen of fiscal necessity for years to come. Reform may lack the metropolitan polish, but it has at least made a virtue of pointing out that the restaurant has limited credit. Labour’s closing of the gap suggests that enough voters have decided, for now, to enjoy the evening and worry about indigestion later.
The night is young, the music plays on, and the flowers still smell sweet. But the taxi meter, one notes with the weary sagacity of repeated experience, is already ticking. And somewhere in the background, the waiters are preparing the most comprehensive bill the establishment has seen in quite some time. One can only hope the company has brought a sufficiently large wallet—or at least the political equivalent of a good credit rating. History suggests we should not count on it.