Conference laps up Andy unplugged as he offers chance to take road less travelled | John Crace

You’ve got to hand it to Andy Burnham. He left nothing out on the pitch. It would have been so easy to play it safe. To deliver a traditional leader’s speech to a home crowd. One we’ve been seeing from leaders of all parties for more than 15 years. Something warm, a feelgood vibes word salad with the odd minor spending announcement thrown in. Hell, the Labour conference would have probably settled for it. They already had all the hope that they had come for. The hope that they were back in with a fighting chance of winning the next election. They wouldn’t have even dared think that three months ago.

But Andy did it differently. Just as he had promised. He had said he was a different kind of politician and he duly made good on that. Hope came with honesty, he said. And honesty was what we got. Nothing was redacted. No coded hints. Come the end of his hour-long speech, no one could be in any doubt about what he thought. More than that, what he believed.

Not so much a speech, more an article of faith. This was Andy unplugged. Unmediated. That most elusive of hybrids. The career politician who can still make the political personal and deliver it fearlessly. Keir Starmer could never have done this, even if he had wanted to. He was just too naturally cautious. A man one step removed from himself. Andy was running on pure emotion. Some things you can’t fake. At one point, just as he was about to talk about his dad, he choked up. Unable to speak. It became a moment of communion.

Burnham was not going to die wondering. He knew he might be delivering one of the longest suicide notes in history, but he did it anyway. Because he couldn’t not do it. Better to go down remaining true to his principles than being slowly airbrushed out of history like the previous six prime ministers. Failures all. Andy was prepared to burn through all his political capital right there in Liverpool, right then. Not just for his own legacy but for a country he wanted to rebuild. It was the only way he could look himself in the mirror. Honour his parents.

It goes without saying that Andy was received with a long series of near rapturous standing ovations throughout the speech. The audience was only too happy to be a pushover. Even the physicist Brian Cox. He was up and down like a yo-yo. If there were any black holes in the sums, he was far too polite to point them out. Not that this was a speech where anything so grubby as actual numbers were spelled out. This was all big-picture stuff. A reimagined vision of the future. Where the country didn’t feel permanently broke and broken.

“All together now,” Burnham began. That would be his rallying cry. And he put his money where his mouth was. So many politicians use their conference speeches to trash the other parties. Many of the cabinet have done just that this week. But Andy didn’t once namecheck his rivals or use them to score points. The closest he got was to say we would all have failed if we voted in a divisive party on a vote of less than 30%. He would rather work with opposition parties for the common good.

Fat chance. This is never going to happen. The idea of getting Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch round a table and agreeing to a unified sense of purpose was never going to happen. Kemi is unable to even agree with herself. But it sounded good. On message with brand Burnham. And Andy is no fool. That’s why most of the changes were ones that would be up for grabs at the next election. He wasn’t about to rat out on the manifesto that Labour had campaigned and won on. That would be a breach of trust. Not the Burnham way.

This was a line in the sand. A chance for the country to take the road less travelled. It was up to voters whether they wanted to follow Burnham or stick with a decade of failure. That included Keir. Andy did give his predecessor a passing nod of thanks for winning the election but his heart wasn’t really in it. Later in the speech, he talked of the key moments in Labour history. 1945. 1964. 1997. And now. Not 2024. Keir was a has-been. A leader in the school of failure.

Nothing was off the table. Social care. Bring it on. Other politicians of all parties had been content to ignore it on the grounds that it was just too difficult to sort out. Far better that old people should die of dementia in their own piss and shit than politicians be forced to make decisions that might cost them a general election. Just keep calm, tinker around the edges and carry on.

The triple lock. For years, most economists have been saying the triple lock is financially unsustainable and has redressed the imbalance in pensions for which it was introduced. But no party had dared touch it. Terrified that old people would take their revenge at the ballot box. So politicians had pretended to be able to fix the problem with telepathy. Just think pure thoughts and the problem would go away. Andy was prepared to rip it up and replace it with a double lock.

Electoral reform. Even the Lib Dems had gone a bit quiet on that one after they won more than 70 seats in 2024. Burnham was all for it. People were fed up with feeling that their vote didn’t count. He didn’t say what form of voting should replace first past the post, but even the most anodyne form of proportional representation would have left Labour short of a majority at the last election. Not all Labour MPs will have been pleased to hear that one. They are going to have to get used to it for the next three years at least.

Andy wasn’t finished. There was still Brexit to go. It had been an unmitigated failure and it was time for a radical reset. Anything was on the table. It was like listening to a stream of consciousness. A private therapy session in which everything that had been bothering Burnham about the way the country didn’t work was laid out for public consumption. And Liverpool loved it. Loved Andy. He was one of them. It would have been no surprise if he had ended by ascending into heaven. As it was, he walked among the faithful. They were his people and he was one of them. Let’s hope it lasts.