“Andy Burnham vows no early general election before 2029” was Metro’s take-away headline after a recent interview between the PM and the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.
His aides have been “adamant, consistent and emphatic” that there will be no snap election, said The Spectator’s political editor Tim Shipman. But Burnham’s obvious hesitation when answering the question “was that of a man calculating the trade-off between survival now and long-term freedom of manoeuvre”.
What did the commentators say?
Burnham spent his first two weeks as PM in a “blitz of hyperactivity”, said The Guardian’s deputy political editor Jessica Elgot. “Bus fares, business rates, energy bill cuts, defence, Ukraine and devolution – he has been everywhere,” and brought a “renewed sense of optimism” among Labour MPs, buoyed by a series of polls that show the party leading Reform UK for the first time in more than a year.
For all his denials, a part of Burnham’s brain “will be furtively wondering whether it might become feasible to go to the country this autumn or early next year”, said Andrew Rawnsley, associate politics editor at The Observer. If “the bounce does get bouncier” then “the risk-reward ratio could begin to look more enticing”.
The Burnham bounce is “real”, Dylan Spielman, who led Labour’s data science team through the 2024 general election, told The Guardian, “but not yet big enough to put Labour back on course for a majority”.
More in Common’s voting intention tracker puts Labour on 28%, ahead of Reform UK on 24%, which, while a marked improvement from polling under Keir Starmer, would still likely mean a hung parliament if an election were held tomorrow.
The problem is that “so far the recovery has mainly come from reuniting the progressive bloc” who had drifted towards the Greens. while Labour is still “making much less progress winning back Reform voters and Conservatives who are pivotal in marginal seats”.
Labour candidate Bev Craig’s emphatic win in the Manchester mayoral election will have given Burnham “more food for thought”, said The Telegraph’s John Power. The PM’s coronation has, “for the moment, crushed his Left flank” while the Right is now “electorally split between the Conservatives and Reform”, with the latter struggling to move on from a series of political donation scandals.
The “strategic logic” behind calling an early election, “perhaps after a few more weeks of positive announcements, seems unassailable if the polls continue to trend up”. With no mandate and a reality-checking Budget due at the end of October, the PM’s “political strategy of promising everything to everyone has a natural timespan on it”. Labour sources are briefing that if the government consistently posts poll leads of 5% to 8%, Burnham will be advised to “go for it” and call a snap election.
What next?
In 2007, Gordon Brown failed to quash speculation of a snap election during his No. 10 honeymoon period – and never recovered when he backed out of holding one at the last minute, said Peter Franklin in UnHerd. The lesson for Burnham is that he “needs to reconcile two contradictory objectives: killing the anticipation that a snap election is imminent while leaving himself with the option of calling one”.
If Burnham does call an early election, “he’ll be like a gambler sticking all his winnings on one last spin of the roulette wheel”, said The Express’s Harvey Jones. “My guess is he’ll bank them instead”, but “if the first big crisis sends his poll ratings into freefall, he may wish he’d thrown caution to the wind while Lady Luck was still smiling”.