Popcorn politics: Labour’s “Stop Burnham” farce turns Manchester into a self-own factory

There’s a particular kind of political entertainment you only get when a party wins a landslide and immediately starts behaving like it’s lost. Not “lost an election” — lost its nerve. Lost its story. Lost the plot.

And that’s what the Andy Burnham saga is: not a by-election story, not even really a Manchester story — but a live demonstration of a governing party that no longer trusts itself to act like a governing party.

Burnham applies to stand for Labour in the Gorton and Denton by-election. Starmer’s allies urge Starmer to block him. Anonymous quotes fly around saying if Keir doesn’t stop it, “it’s game over”. The NEC could meet within hours. A fight over Labour’s future is suddenly reduced to one question: will the machine allow one of its most popular politicians to run as a Labour candidate.

That’s not a party projecting competence. That’s a party projecting fear.

And fear is contagious.

The real crash isn’t happening in Parliament. It’s happening in the public mind. People keep trying to explain Labour’s slump as a technical matter of policy, delivery, or comms. But governments don’t fall out of favour because the electorate sits down with a spreadsheet and decides to rebalance. They fall out of favour because they trip the same psychological wiring that breaks any relationship: expectations go up, reality doesn’t match, disappointment hardens into suspicion, and then everything you do is interpreted through the lens of self-interest.

Labour won big on 4 July 2024 — 411 seats — and immediately started governing as if a landslide is a personality rather than a temporary loan.  You can feel the hangover in the language now: defensiveness, briefings, process, factions, internal threat management. The party has mistaken “permission” for “love”, which is the classic winner’s curse. Voters didn’t sign a marriage contract. They handed you the keys and watched to see if you’d drive like an adult. If you start swerving on day one, they don’t blame the road. They blame the driver.

This is where behavioural economics turns out to be more useful than ideology. A landslide acts like an expectation pump. It re-anchors what people think is “normal” and what they think you can do. You stop being compared to the last lot and start being compared to the future you implied — even if you never formally promised it. That is why U-turns are so poisonous. They aren’t just policy shifts. They’re status signals. They say: we didn’t mean it, we can’t do it, we’re not in control of ourselves. It’s the competence heuristic snapping — the mental shortcut where the public decides whether you’re fit to run the country.

And once that heuristic breaks, you don’t get to rebuild it by explaining. You rebuild it by behaving differently, consistently, over time. Which is difficult if you can’t even get through a week without trying to kneecap your own people in public.

That’s why Burnham matters. The story isn’t “Andy Burnham wants to stand”. The story is Labour advertising, loudly, that it is frightened of its own talent — while also insisting it needs “the best team” to beat Reform and hold difficult ground.  Either Starmer blocks him and looks authoritarian and paranoid, or he doesn’t and the media runs a leadership subplot for weeks because Burnham’s ambitions have been an open rumour for years and everyone knows it.  Either way, Labour looks like it’s fighting Labour — and voters do not reward parties that appear to be their own worst enemy.

The cost argument makes it worse, not better. The public case being floated is that a mayoral by-election would be expensive, and the party isn’t in a position to fight two big contests at once.  Even if you think that’s sensible internally, the external message is catastrophic: “We can’t afford democracy right now.” Politics isn’t supposed to sound like a council finance meeting. Once you start presenting elections as an unwanted cost centre, you’ve already conceded the bigger point: you’re not confident enough to win.

Now widen the lens, because the Burnham circus isn’t happening in isolation. Labour’s real strategic problem is that it is being hollowed out from both sides, at the exact moment it needs to look like a coherent national project.

On the right, Reform offers emotional clarity: anger, blame, simple villains, simple fixes. Even if Reform’s support wobbles at times, the mood that powers it doesn’t disappear — it migrates. It splits. Some goes to apathy. Some goes to independents. Some goes elsewhere. Protest sentiment behaves more like electricity than loyalty: it flows wherever the path feels easiest.

On the left, Labour now has a second problem: the Corbyn–Sultana “Your Party” project is essentially the left’s own version of the same protest mechanics — a product built on purity, betrayal narratives, and the dopamine hit of being able to say “I told you so” without having to deliver anything. And the dark comedy is that even this shiny new escape hatch can’t avoid the gravitational pull of factionalism. It’s already being reported as internally split, with Corbyn and Sultana backing different slates for control of the executive.

That matters because it gives disillusioned soft-left Labour voters a psychologically satisfying off-ramp. When people feel disappointed, they don’t want nuance, they want a story that explains their pain and confirms their identity. “Labour sold out” is far more emotionally efficient than “governing is hard and the state is broken”. It’s not an argument; it’s a belonging signal.

And then you’ve got the Greens, who are quietly picking up exactly the voters Labour can’t afford to lose: people who still want decency, competence, and moral intent, but don’t want the stench of machine politics. The Greens don’t have to govern nationally, so they can keep a clean conscience while Labour absorbs the costs of reality. In a low-trust environment, that asymmetry is a gift.

So where does that leave Labour?

Right in the middle with nothing. Not in the sensible “broad church” way — in the dead-centre no-man’s-land where you’re too managerial to inspire, too compromised to be believed, and too internally fractured to look competent. Labour is trying to sell the least emotionally compelling offer in politics: “responsible management”, delivered by a party that keeps broadcasting that it can’t manage itself.

This is exactly how a majority “crashes” in public perception. Not because the government did literally nothing, but because the public stops interpreting anything generously. Once that switch flips, every briefing looks like self-preservation, every internal fight looks like selfishness, and every U-turn looks like weakness. The machine starts acting like a machine — protecting itself, policing its borders, prioritising control — and voters interpret that as contempt.

And that’s where the national story becomes local, fast.

Local parties are where national dysfunction becomes personal. The national leadership’s weakness removes the social pressure to stay unified. Selection fights turn into proxy wars. Activists lose the permission structure they need to campaign with conviction, because you can’t knock doors confidently for “change” when your own side is leaking that it’s “game over” if the wrong Labour figure is allowed to stand.  The whole thing becomes tribal: status, loyalty, identity, who’s in, who’s out, who’s pure, who’s pragmatic. That isn’t how you build coalitions. It’s how you dissolve them.

And once voters mentally file you as “the machine”, local politics becomes brutally observational. They stop listening to national rhetoric and start judging what they can see: potholes, bins, planning decisions, the same excuses, the same faces, the same absence of accountability. Even if you’ve got good intentions, you inherit the penalty of being the incumbent brand — and incumbency in a low-trust era is a tax you pay daily.

The Labour machine still thinks politics is won by control: control the process, control the candidate, control the message, control the internal party. But voters don’t reward control. They reward credibility. Credibility comes from acting like you’re not afraid, being consistent enough to be legible, and looking like you’re fighting for the public rather than fighting your colleagues.

The Burnham episode fails that test, and it fails it loudly.

So no, Labour’s majority didn’t “crash” because voters suddenly became fickle. It evaporated because Labour engineered a perfect behavioural storm: a landslide that inflated expectations, a governing style that triggered loss aversion and disappointment, U-turn cues that fractured the competence signal, and an internal culture that keeps choosing control over belief.

Reform pulls from one side with rage. Corbyn’s Your Party tugs from the other with purity and betrayal. The Greens siphon off the voters who still want good intentions without the machine. Labour is left holding the clipboard in the middle, wondering why nobody’s impressed by the minutes of the meeting.

And that’s the real clown show: a party in power behaving like it’s already in opposition — except this time, it’s opposing itself.

RW