Because that was the real, not always stated, reason for Burnham’s return. The current Labour leader is merely the figurehead of grotesquely corrupt Labour Together. He lied to get the top job. His “handler” Morgan McSweeney boasted - or others boasted on his behalf - that Labour Together had worked to deliberately throw the 2019 General Election. Membership has plummeted as a result.
And that is where a Burnham leadership comes in, or so many in the wider Labour movement will be hoping. There were lots of activists turning out for his campaign, but the problem at a General Election, or round of local elections, is that covering the wider ground becomes less easy as party members become less willing to turn out, and there are less of them in the first place.
Whether or not Starmer contests a leadership election is less important than the fact that his time is up. Burnham’s election should have told him that. Some in the current cabinet are telling Starmer to set a timetable for his departure; others will join in, fuel the momentum. That is not the difficult part for Burnham. Making the Labour Party electable nationwide once more - that’s the hard bit.
There are some Labour MPs who should not be in Parliament. At all. Peter Kyle is one of them: only last week, it was revealed that one of his constituents had contacted him to express her horror at events in Gaza. His office contacted the cops. THEY CALLED THE COPS ON A CONCERNED CONSTITUENT. After a whole year, the case was thrown out. The constituent was awarded costs.
Nor can he paper over the gaping cracks in the Government taking its heads off the ball. While Starmer and his colleagues have banged on about anti-Semitism, criminalising middle-aged women, the real threat - the far-right and their fellow travellers trying to make mass deportation of non-white British citizens respectable - have mainly evaded attention. That has to stop.
Paranoid wacko Rupert Lowe - too barking even for the Farage Falange - is now claiming that non-white citizens, whom Lowe likes to claim are all of Pakistani heritage, have over the years raped around a quarter of a million women and girls. The figure is based on a guess. It is the most grotesque exaggeration. Where are the Starmer stumblers? Absent elsewhere.
Demonisation of minorities, and especially Muslims, has been allowed to take hold, and, indeed, has become fashionable within the right-leaning part of our free and fearless press. If anything is making the streets less safe, it is this whipping up of the mob. Where is Starmer’s challenge to the racist, fascist and dishonest far right? As before, it is absent elsewhere.
Andy Burnham needs to take on board Galbraith’s definition of leadership: “All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership”. Living standards. The NHS. A decent environment. And not authoritarianism.
Burnham must offer not only honesty, but vision. And hope that tomorrow will be better than today for all those have-nots. No pressure, then.
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