Burnham is unusual in politics because even colleagues who are furious that he ousted Sir Keir Starmer say he is an affable and decent person.<\/p>\n
But does he have the experience and skills to pick Labour’s morale up off the floor, and tackle the deep problems the country has?<\/p>\n
One old friend wonders: “He is a lovely bloke, but I just don’t know if he is up to it \u2013 that is the honest question.”<\/p>\n
Being Mr Nice Guy isn’t enough to be an effective prime minister in a confusing and brutal political era.<\/p>\n
But you can be ruthless with a smile, and Andy Burnham is willing to follow advice from one of the most effective leaders of recent decades \u2013 not one of the prime ministers, but Sir Alex Ferguson.<\/p>\n
I’m told the former Manchester United boss bumped into Burnham and wanted to chat politics.<\/p>\n
He wanted to know why there had been so much bad blood and briefing between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, saying if he’d been Blair, he would have “got him in a room, and said, you’re either with me, or you can sod off”. The actual phrasing he used was far ruder than that \u2013 but you get the drift.<\/p>\n
A close ally of Burnham told me: “We might need the Ferguson hairdryer \u2013 this is our moment and we might have to tell people, if you’re not with me, well bye, and thanks for your time.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Burnham is unusual in politics because even colleagues who are furious that he ousted Sir Keir Starmer say…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":698656,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-698655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698655\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/698656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}