(Image: Annabel Lee-Ellis)
THEY say a week is a long time in politics. A year must therefore seem like a lifetime.
It was a year ago that Andy Burnham slunk out of the Labour Party conference leaving Sir Keir Starmer loyalists to make jokes about his failed coup.
A year on, he is the Prime Minister and Mr Starmer, on Thursday, ceases to be even an MP.
In the last year, Mr Burnham has engineered a by-election, won it well, engineered a takeover of the Labour Party and so far that too has gone well. There has been a Burnham bounce; Labour is ahead in the polls – albeit slightly and at least partly because Reform is having such a tough time of it.
Today, Mr Burnham makes his first conference speech as leader. It will all be smiles and it will all be about hope.
And it is true that his upbeat nature has had a positive impact on the country – how better to be hopeful rather than dismal, as Mr Starmer so often sounded.
Perhaps today is Mr Burnham’s last opportunity to bask in the glory of his last year.
Very soon, reality will intrude.
His chancellor, John Healey, managed to dodge reality yesterday with a great, upbeat speech about reindustrialisation without spelling out how, with an increasingly bleak global economic output, we are going to pay for it.
Yesterday, diesel prices reached 199.18p a litre and the latest prediction for the January fuel cap is a 24 per cent rise – terrible for domestic users but potentially disastrous for businesses that make anything.
Yet so far, Mr Burnham has only won headlines for his pledge to sort out social care – a big, brave and welcome pledge, but at some point soon we will have to have details and we will have to have the bill.