Voices: Andy Burnham’s secret: he talks left but actually puts off most decisions

With Keir Starmer, a pattern emerged. He would be warned that he was heading for trouble – and he would duly slam into a brick wall.

He was unprepared for government, he was told, and so he was. Don’t mess with pensioners, he was told, and he took away their winter fuel payment. Labour MPs will rebel if you try to cut welfare, he was told, and they did.

Andy Burnham has a different pattern. He is warned that he is heading for trouble – and he avoids it. He was told that including the killers of PC Andrew Harper in early release from prison would be a disaster: he initially said he had pushed the system as far as it would go, and it wouldn’t be possible to exclude them – but then, miraculously, it was.

He was told that he would have to raise taxes again in the Budget and that would be the end of his vibes-based honeymoon: but he managed to put up taxes on the banks by such a small amount that even they were relieved – and he sailed through what he boasted on Wednesday was “the most popular Budget for a number of years”.

Now he is told that the welfare dilemma is back and that there is no way he can escape the trap in which his predecessor found himself. But if the pattern holds, expect the prime minister with one bound to be free when Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, announces the plan on Tuesday.

It was all looking ominous when Alan Milburn, the former minister who was more Blairite than Blair, said that the problem of youth unemployment was so entrenched that he was proposing higher public spending in the short term in order to yield a return later.

This seemed to admit that the only thing the Labour rebels got wrong last year was that they failed to demand that spending on disability benefits be increased even faster than planned.

Except that here was the prime minister speaking to journalists in Dublin yesterday: “We’re having a conversation within government about reprioritising spending,” he said. “It’s not more money – it’s just thinking differently about how and when we intervene and how we support young people.”

I do not pretend to know precisely how McFadden and Milburn will make the conjuring trick work, but I have seen enough of Burnham as prime minister to predict that he will somehow manage to restrain the forecast growth in spending on benefits while keeping the Parliamentary Labour Party happy.

It helps that many of the ringleaders of last year’s revolt are in the cabinet. Louise Haigh is in effect deputy prime minister, while Lucy Powell and Angela Rayner have been restored to high office.

It helps even more that many Labour MPs who thought they would be in parliament for a single term can now dream of re-election. If McFadden by mistake read out the Conservative plan to cut welfare spending by a totally made-up £36bn a year, they would probably cheer and wave their order papers at that.

The talk of Westminster last week was a column in the Financial Times by Janan Ganesh, in which he described Burnham as a “master at work”: his “leftwing remarks and gestures delight people of that persuasion; so much so that he does not have to give them policies of real consequence – or cost”.

Ganesh, something of a master at work himself, knows how to turn a phrase. He describes Burnham as a “visionary tinkerer”, a “national mood-manager” and “authentically shallow”.

So true, and so effective. The conventional view is that Burnham cannot put off the really difficult decisions for ever. But of course he can. He is like Harold Wilson in his sinuous ability to manage the Labour Party and public opinion at the same time.

And the pattern is repeated over Europe. Oh dear, say the wise owls of Portcullis House, the parliamentary annexe where MPs, advisers and journalists mix: raising the possibility of rejoining the EU is dangerous. Expectations will be raised, Vote Leave will revive itself (it has, calling itself Stay Out), awkward questions will be asked about opt-outs and rebates.

Yet it has worked a treat. Coincidentally, Ganesh made his name as biographer of George Osborne, and Osborne made a Ganeshish observation in his podcast this week. He detected an “emerging Burnham style” in his handling of Europe: “You raise an issue, keep the plates spinning, but you never actually put the plate on the table.”

Thus Burnham has delighted Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green rejoiners, without having to commit himself to anything more than the modest adjustments to Britain’s relationship with the EU that were mostly negotiated when Starmer was prime minister, and which will be signed off at the summit on Friday.

Cabinet ministers have had their noses put out of joint by Burnham launching a debate on Europe and then writing to them telling them they must not take part in it, but everyone else is happy.

How long can Burnham keep it up? Surely he will run out of money, or the British people will run out of patience, before too long? Maybe. Or maybe he never needs to put the plate on the table. Why do something today when you can put it off until tomorrow? Tomorrow never comes.