Labour’s support once sat above 30%. By spring it had fallen to 17%. That is the hole Andy Burnham inherits as Britain’s new prime minister, after Keir Starmer resigned and Burnham became the only Labour MP to collect enough nominations to lead the party.
Writing in The Guardian, Tim Soutphommasane called the handover a coronation by British standards and, by Australian ones, a leadership coup. Burnham spent months stalking Starmer, he wrote, in what he described as a meticulous campaign by the politician nicknamed the “King of the North.” A byelection in Makerfield carried him from the mayor’s office in greater Manchester into the Commons and then to Downing Street.
How Labour got here
Only two years earlier, Starmer had led Labour to a decisive election win. The glow did not last. The party has been in electoral freefall for nearly 18 months, Soutphommasane noted, while Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has led the polls consistently since May 2025.
He faults the Starmer government for its tone from the outset. Voters wanted an end to a long stretch of austerity and a leader who could fix what many see as a broken country. Instead Starmer warned them that “things will get worse before we get better,” a line meant to manage expectations that, in the columnist’s view, demoralised people.
A different pitch
Burnham is trying another register. In a major speech last month he promised “a new era of possibility for Britain” and urged supporters to “give them that feeling, that ability to hope, to aspire for better.” Soutphommasane calls him a more natural politician than Starmer, unafraid to show his northern authenticity, and says Labour now has a leader who can make an argument and put forward a vision.
Words are not delivery, though. Burnham will have to produce economic growth and shore up what the column describes as a society showing cracks. Some wonder whether he marks a real break from Starmer or just a more charismatic face on the same substance. The column adds that hope cannot be only tone: it needs a program behind it.
Populists under scrutiny
Burnham may get a short summer honeymoon, the columnist argues, because his rivals are stumbling. Farage has faced scrutiny over donations and support his party received, including from a cryptocurrency billionaire and a convicted criminal. He resigned his Commons seat, forcing a byelection in Clacton that Soutphommasane expects to be a farcical contest against the novelty candidate Count Binface.
In Australia, he writes, Pauline Hanson of One Nation has drawn her own questions. Her call for a “monocultural Australia” shows she has not changed since the 1990s, and during a trip to the UK and Europe she appeared on a podcast with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who is also known as Tommy Robinson.
Neither Reform nor One Nation is certain to win government, Soutphommasane says. The Australian Labor party, facing One Nation’s rise over the cost of living and housing affordability, should read Starmer’s collapse as a warning that a commanding majority can evaporate quickly. Whether British Labour moved in time, he concludes, will be known soon enough.
Sources
- Andy Burnham as new UK PM faces the defining test for the centre-left. Australia will be watching closely | Tim Soutphommasane
- Andy Burnham as UK PM: Centre-Left's Defining Test for Australia
