Rachel Reeves has thrown her considerable weight behind Andy Burnham as the next Labour leader, and thus, presumably, the next Prime Minister. The news was met with a collective yawn from the Westminster commentariat, who had been hoping for a more dramatic turn in Labour’s long march back to respectability. But this yawn, my friends, is the sound of a party that has learned the lesson of the late Republic: stability above all.
The Reeves-Burnham partnership is a signal that Labour has abandoned the poetic delusions of Corbynism for the prose of municipal competence. Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, is the living embodiment of provincial stewardship. He has spent years perfecting the art of being a competent administrator, a man who can talk about bus routes and housing estates without descending into the rhetorical bombast that so characterised the party’s recent past.
Reeves, the Shadow Chancellor, is his intellectual complement: a woman who has read her economic history and knows that fiscal discipline is the bedrock of any lasting political project. Together, they represent a recovery not just of Labour’s electoral chances but of Britain’s institutional confidence. For too long, our institutions have been treated as punching bags by populists of left and right.
The Supreme Court, the BBC, the civil service: all have been weakened by a decade of political vandalism. The Reeves-Burnham axis promises a restoration. Burnham’s record in Manchester is a quiet rebuke to the chaos of Westminster: he built a bus franchise, improved air quality, and kept the city running through the pandemic.
This is the politics of the plausible. Reeves, meanwhile, has been laying the groundwork for a new economic settlement, one that does not rely on the magic money tree but on a rejuvenated industrial policy. The comparison to the early Victorian era is inescapable: a period of reform driven by a moral sense of duty and a hard-headed grasp of economics.
The question, as always, is whether this boring stability can survive the inevitable shocks. The fall of Rome was not caused by any single emperor but by a gradual decay of civic virtue. Labour’s recovery is a sign that virtue may still exist.
But be warned: the barbarians are at the gates, and they are not all from abroad.
