Can Andy Burnham save Britain? Wait, what would that even mean?

However long Andy Burnham may last as the United Kingdom’s prime minister, he has already made clear he won’t play the role of international anti-Trump liberal dreamboat previously held by Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau (and currently occupied, however awkwardly, by Canadian premier Mark Carney).

Perhaps that’s just as well. Scratch that; there’s no “perhaps” about it. As every single article about Burnham’s accession to power will inform you, he is now Britain’s seventh prime minister within the last 10 years, going back — not at all coincidentally — to the Brexit vote in 2016 that ended then-P.M. David Cameron’s career and sent the U.K. down the slippery slide into international irrelevance and permanent financial crisis. 

If Brexit defenders can still be found in the wild, such as Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, the right-wing renegade who hopes to replace Burnham two or three years from now (the imprecise scheduling of elections being a distinctive feature of British democracy), they are starting to sound an awful lot like the MAGA apologists who embrace Reflecting Pool conspiracy theories or willingly go on television to explain why the Iran war was a genius idea. No one seriously disputes that the abrupt separation from the European Union has cratered the British economy. Several studies suggest that GDP per capita has declined by at least 6%, a serious recession in a period when most other major nations have seen modest economic growth. 

Furthermore, while Brexit was supposed to give the U.K. greater control of its borders, the globally troublesome issues surrounding migration have only gotten worse. Net migration into England, Scotland and Wales from all sources — undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers, students and tourists who overstay visas — spiked to unprecedented levels between 2017 and 2023, and nearly 20% of the British population is foreign-born. (That number is roughly 15% in the U.S.) Whether that’s a positive or negative in cultural or economic terms is at least somewhat subjective, but it’s indisputably a political hot potato that none of Burnham’s five or so predecessors has known how to handle. 

In other words, Burnham has no time, and no political latitude, to stand athwart the battlements of history facing down the forces of Trumpism, especially as the formerly formidable MAGA juggernaut collapses into the D.C. swamp, howling as it dies. Having staged a remarkably successful coup within Britain’s ruling Labour Party in response to outgoing leader Keir Starmer’s chronic irresolution on virtually all issues, Burnham has calculated that he needs to appear decisive and pragmatic straight out of the box. The former Manchester mayor comes off as a gregarious, upbeat fellow with an admittedly nerdy overlay. If he’s not exactly John F. Kennedy, he clearly outdoes Starmer on charisma (not a high bar). He begins with a considerable reservoir of goodwill, but whether improved vibes can correct the Labour government’s toxic drift remains to be seen.

His will be a “cost of living” government, Burnham said after entering 10 Downing Street this week, simultaneously dedicated to reducing fuel and food prices for working people while also, somehow or other, pumping up the U.K.’s defense budget as part of a long-term commitment to NATO’s response to Russian aggression. Those may well be defensible or admirable policy goals, but if they sound at least somewhat contradictory and also unlikely to inspire the liberal-progressive Labour left that came to despise Starmer for his ideological fecklessness and united around Burnham as the “soft left” alternative, you have correctly understood the new prime minister’s predicament. 

Furthermore, if all this has the depressingly familiar feeling of a repeated bad dream, it probably should. The enduring parallel between British and American politics has always been slightly out of sync — Maggie Thatcher was a year and a half ahead of Ronald Reagan, while Bill Clinton preceded Tony Blair by more than four years — and Burnham seems at immediate risk of the “Joe Biden syndrome” that torpedoed Starmer and has undermined other centrist leaders, including Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. 

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As political challenges go, Burnham’s would seem to fall partway between unlikely and impossible. He’s betting everything on being perceived as a competent and effective manager of the British economy, which is likely to involve closer ties with the E.U. but not quite undoing Brexit, in order to dampen the culture-war currents and anti-immigrant fervor boosting Farage’s party, while also being just enough of a social democrat to keep the disgruntled Labour left largely onside. 

To raise the difficulty level several more notches, all of that is necessary at the same moment when the U.K. has suddenly become a multi-party democracy, more or less on the European model, rather than an American-style duopoly. While Reform UK swept local elections in both “Middle England” regions formerly dominated by the borderline-irrelevant Conservative Party and the previously Labour-friendly post-industrial north, the resurgent Green Party has made major gains on the left in London and other major cities and the centrist Liberal Democrats remain solidly entrenched in middle-class suburbia. 

It’s not much of an exaggeration, in fact, to suggest that the current British situation is something like the Democrats splitting into three different parties and the Republicans into two. Whether that’s likely to lead to greater or less political coherence and national conflict is impossible to say, but both systems will face severe stress tests in the years ahead. Burnham has suggested that his government will offer Britain one last chance to fend off the far right. That has the ring of self-serving mythology, but one thing seems almost certain: This will be the U.K.’s last one-party majority government for years to come. 

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