There is an old saying, polished by the years into something that almost sounds profound, which holds that if you are not a socialist when young you have no heart, and if you are not a conservative when old you have no head. It is the sort of neat binary that flatters the speaker into believing he has traversed the full arc of human wisdom in a single sentence. One begins life overflowing with unearned compassion and ends it clutching a ledger. Between the two poles, presumably, lies a brief interlude of actual thought.
Andy Burnham, newly installed as Prime Minister and already one month into the experiment, appears to have skipped the interlude entirely. He has retained the heart of a student union president and acquired none of the head that might once have been expected of a man in his mid-fifties. The result is a government that feels less like an administration than a prolonged gap year, conducted at public expense and with the full resources of the British state.
His first month has been a masterclass in the politics of the warm feeling. Where previous prime ministers might have begun with the tedious necessities of markets, borders or the national accounts, Burnham opened with a tour of the North, broadcasting sincerity at every regional railway station that still possessed a functioning platform. He spoke of “rebalancing” with the solemnity of a man who has just discovered the existence of maps. London, that tiresome concentration of people who occasionally pay tax, was invited to feel suitably chastened. The City was assured that its days of excess were numbered, though the precise number remained vague, rather like the costing of most of his early announcements.
One waited, perhaps naively, for the moment when the heart would consult the head. It did not arrive. Instead came the announcement of a new industrial strategy built around “community wealth-building,” a phrase that manages to sound both virtuous and suspiciously like a local authority PowerPoint from 2009. Factories would open in places that had last seen industry when Harold Wilson was still promising the white heat of technology. The mechanism by which this renaissance would occur was left delightfully unspecified, beyond the promise of more public money and the vigorous waving of a northern accent. Markets, those cold instruments of the head, were expected to fall into line out of sheer moral improvement.
Foreign policy received similar treatment. Burnham’s first outing on the international stage suggested a man who still believes the world can be improved by the correct facial expression. He offered solidarity to every underdog within microphone range while carefully avoiding any suggestion that underdogs sometimes become top dogs and start behaving rather worse. The special relationship was rebranded as a “partnership of equals,” which is the diplomatic equivalent of telling your richer friend that you will both split the bill next time. The richer friend, one suspects, has already checked the exchange rate.
At home the NHS was once again declared the envy of the world, a claim that grows more touching the longer the waiting lists become. Burnham’s solution was characteristically cardiac: more nurses, more doctors, more feelings. The awkward arithmetic of training places, retention and productivity was waved away as the sort of mean-spirited calculation only a conservative would make after the age of forty. Housing policy followed the same pattern. Targets were set with the confidence of a man who has never tried to obtain planning permission in a constituency that already has enough houses for the people who vote for him. The green belt, that sacred relic of middle-class self-interest, was to be protected and simultaneously ignored, a feat of quantum policy-making that only a pure heart could attempt.
What has been most striking is the absence of any visible learning curve. Most politicians, even the more sentimental ones, eventually discover that the Treasury is not a branch of the Samaritans. Burnham appears to regard it as a particularly well-funded branch of the Samaritans. His early budget measures possessed the cheerful unreality of a student manifesto written after the third bottle of wine. Wealth taxes were floated with the air of a man who believes capital is a moral failing rather than a movable feast. Business leaders were invited to round-tables and then spoken to as if they were particularly slow pupils in a citizenship class. The markets, those soulless entities, responded by doing what markets do when confronted with pure heart: they priced in the risk and quietly headed for the exits.
One searches in vain for the compensatory head. There is no evidence that Burnham has undergone the traditional conversion that the old adage promises. He has not discovered the uses of restraint, the virtues of incentives, or the awkward truth that compassion unaccompanied by competence tends to leave the objects of its concern worse off than before. Instead he has doubled down on the emotional repertoire that served him so well as mayor of Greater Manchester, a role in which the gap between rhetoric and delivery could be softened by the convenient presence of central government to blame. Now he is central government. The alibi has been withdrawn.
There is something almost touching about the persistence of the youthful posture. Burnham still campaigns as if the main obstacle to national renewal is insufficient sincerity. He has not yet grasped that the country has heard a great deal of sincerity over the past decade and remains stubbornly untransformed by it. The head, that unfashionable organ, might have whispered that institutions matter more than intentions, that incentives shape behaviour more reliably than speeches, and that the North cannot be revived solely by the power of northern feeling. The whisper appears not to have reached him.
And so the first month closes with the nation treated to the unusual spectacle of a prime minister who has arrived in office already nostalgic for the purity of opposition. He has the heart, certainly. It beats loudly and in public. What he lacks is the head that might once have counselled him to put the heart on a slightly shorter leash. The old adage, for all its neatness, turns out to be incomplete. It fails to account for the special case of the man who grows older without ever quite growing up. In that respect, Andy Burnham’s early premiership stands as a living refutation. The heart is present and correct. The head, one fears, is still waiting for the results of its own internal selection process.