Andy Burnham: blocked

A scandal for people who thought the late Queen would veto prorogation

There was a certain segment of the very online Remain world who, back in the prelapsarian times of 2019, genuinely appeared to believe that the late Queen would cancel Boris Johnson’s prorogation of parliament.

The thinking (using that word in a spirit of generosity) ran as follows: proroguing parliament is a royal prerogative (try saying that three times in a row) exercisable by the monarch who, by convention only, acts on the advice of the prime minister.

The irony is that, despite often being referred to as a constitutional crisis, the Wars of Brexit Succession (2016-2020) were only a political crisis. But the late Queen inserting the Royal Family into a power struggle between her legislative and executive branches would have triggered a fully fledged constitutional crisis¹.

All of which is a self-indulgent and nakedly score-settling way of suggesting that Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) was never going to allow Andy Burnham to stand as a candidate in the forthcoming Gorton and Denton by-election. In the words of our real Queen, Taylor Swift, “Like, ever.”

Precedent? I don’t know her

Keir Starmer contains multitudes. The prime minister may possess only a dim sense of what he actually hopes to achieve in office, but he still enjoys a highly cultivated reputation for ruthlessness.

While courting the Labour membership, Starmer called Jeremy Corbyn a friend, before swiftly kicking him out of the parliamentary party and dismantling the Corbyn project. Starmer has shown repeated willingness to discard allies and advisors² once they cease being useful or become a liability to the project.

So, the idea that an NEC still under the control of the prime minister and his allies was going to permit a leadership rival brazenly on manoeuvres to waltz back into parliament was never likely to fly. Not least when Starmer had such a plausible and superficially non-factional reason for blocking Burnham.