Labour happy to switch leadership plotting for a debate over an early election with Burnham

It is a brave new world for the Labour Party as its delegates head to Liverpool for their annual conference.

A summer of dramatic change was summed up by one senior minister who half joked: “This will be the first conference in three years where we won’t be talking about whether Andy Burnham will make a bid to become leader of the party.”

There is a sense too of what a difference a year makes.

Last year Mr Burnham arrived in Liverpool making his ambitions abundantly clear and ended up being mocked and leaving with his tail between his legs.

It only took 10 months for him to finally get elected back to parliament and replace the not-at-all missed Sir Keir Starmer as leader and prime minister.

Now as Labour delegates arrive the talk is not of a leadership contest but whether Mr Burnham will call an early election - an idea which he tried to kill “stone dead” in his pre-conference broadcast interviews.

Despite that fairly emphatic statement, many MPs including his own ministers do not believe him.

“There are calculations being made,” said one minister. “How much are the Tories and Reform cancelling each other out?”

Another noted: “We appear to have pulled back all those votes we have lost to the Greens. Zack Polanski looked like the right leader for the Greens when Keir was in charge but the wrong one now.”

The Independent reported recently senior Labour figures suggesting that a comfortable win in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election, called because of Sir Keir’s decision to quit as an MP after being dumped by his party, will be used to decide whether an early election is triggered.

One minister repeated the suggestion in the run up to the conference: “That is definitely part of the calculation. But of course it is a risk because when the margins are so narrow things can flip quickly.”

The main issue for them appears to be whether the slide for Reform in the last year where they have dropped into third place in some polls and around four or five points behind Labour represents something more permanent or whether they could see a recovery.

“There are still concerns about those red wall seats,” noted one senior figure. “At the moment we seem to be likely to win in those seats because of tactical voting but you cannot rely on that.”

Among those still very nervous about a Reform assault on the red wall is chancellor John Healey who barely held on in 2019 to his Yorkshire seat. Foreign secretary Ed Miliband in Doncaster and Yvette Cooper in Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley also had scares in the same election.

But whether there is an early election or not the mood is undoubtedly more positive for Labour.

“Everyone is feeling more cheerful,” said one MP.

“Spirits have been lifted,” added another.

“We just feel like we have a fighting chance now where before with [Starmer] it was just hopeless.”

The most important change is communication in all its forms.

“Starmer and [former chief of staff Morgan] McSweeney just managed to find the worst way of communicating everything,” said one minister.

“We made a statement on cancelling winter fuel when we could have made one on saving the triple lock but saying the rich would not get their winter fuel to afford it.

“The welfare debacle could have been sold as an increase not a cut. It was all so badly done.”

Then there was the fact that “Starmer just didn’t or maybe couldn’t speak to anybody.”

“He’s really not missed,” another MP noted.

The by-election for his seat in Holborn and St Pancras has also underlined what many suspected.

“Look at Rishi Sunak. He’s stuck around and makes contributions. You can just see what Keir Starmer was in it for now that he is just shuffling off straightaway.”

All this appears to be different with Mr Burnham who is busy communicating on social media with videos on pub snacks and buses or playing the guitar as well as talking to his MPs and ministers.

“It makes such a change,” said one veteran MP.

“Those videos may be fun but he is always making a serious point with them,” added another.

The only people Mr Burnham appears to not want to speak to as much is journalists, with still only one press conference as prime minister in almost three months.

But as one MP put it: “Speeches and press conferences didn’t help Keir Starmer much. Actually quite the opposite.”

The next few days in Liverpool though will tell us whether this fresh optimism is surface deep or more deeply rooted in a party that can sniff a resurgence whenever the next election is called.