Starmer’s irritation with Burnham shows as he seeks to tackle critics | UK News

The prime minister will address a conference of centre-left leaders from around the world on Friday and argue it is time to “look ourselves in the mirror and recognise where we’ve allowed our parties to shy away from people’s concerns.”

A key theme of the Global Progressive Action Conference is about how the Labour Party and its sister outfits around the world take on Reform UK and their equivalents.

“This is the defining political choice of our times: a politics of predatory grievance, preying on the problems of working people… against the politics of patriotic renewal,” Sir Keir Starmer will claim.

And it is this challenge that unites the two big things in politics in the last 48 hours.

First there was the blizzard of headlines about the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham.

Then, conveniently timed, the blizzard of headlines yesterday afternoon about the government’s plans for compulsory digital ID.

This, yes, is the daily din of Westminster, but there is a signal amid the noise.

Personnel, policy and ambitions are all in the mix here, three of the staples of politics, but they are also both a symptom of the same thing: a party and a movement wrestling with how to confront what senior figures agree is a generational challenge – the rise of Reform UK.

This, for so many Labour folk, is not merely the traditional political tussle with the party’s oldest adversary, the Conservatives.

Instead, it is an insurgency which utterly horrifies so many of them.

It is Reform’s recent rise – and the durability of its support, up to now at least – that has fast forwarded the collywobbles in a vast parliamentary Labour Party so soon after a general election.

Of all the criticisms of Sir Keir, there is one that has stuck, almost to the point of cliche, and is acknowledged as being fair within government and beyond.

It is the persistent critique that there has long been a lack of definition about the government’s direction.

And it is into this perceived vacuum that Andy Burnham has stridden, again, to the intense irritation of Downing Street and plenty of Labour MPs.

I know what Labour should stand for and I’d know how I’d communicate it is the underlying message from Manchester, with the implication the prime minister isn’t doing either.

Sir Keir may not strike you as the kind of bloke to be frequently demonstrably angry or irritated.

But when a Labour prime minister compares a Labour colleague to former Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss, you know just how narked he is by the whole thing.

The prime minister and those around him have long privately rolled their eyes at Burnham’s antics.

But when Sir Keir invokes the memory of a prime minister associated with economic calamity and near immediate political oblivion – and, on top of that, suggests his economic prospectus could lead to the same outcomes – you know he isn’t messing about.

Incidentally, the scale of the backlash from Labour MPs to Burnham’s interviews was quite the thing to witness.

Burnham has his supporters in the Parliamentary Labour Party, but boy, plenty told us he should just shut up.

And amid all this comes the crucial new detail about a plan the prime minister has talked up enthusiastically in recent weeks – digital ID.

The new key point – it will be compulsory.

Sir Keir will talk about the idea in his speech at a gathering also attended by Anthony Albanese, the prime minister of Australia, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.

He hopes it is a practical example of how he can give definition to his premiership, have what he hopes is a useful tool in tackling illegal working and therefore illegal immigration, and give himself a useful political dividing line with his opponents.

Reform UK, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party are opposed to the plan.

The Conservative position is more ambiguous. They see it for now at least as a “desperate gimmick” but do remain open to being persuaded it is a good idea.

Is it something he can lean into as a defining idea of his time in office and help him address the predicament he and his party find themselves in? He has to hope so.