Andy Burnham blocked: Keir Starmer is ruthless but right

Keir Starmer faced a simple choice: either suffer the temporary embarrassment of blocking a rival, or paralyse the government by allowing Andy Burnham to be the focus of persistent leadership speculation.

The prime minister chose the first option, because that is in the best interests of the country, the Labour Party – and himself. Politicians can be ruthless, hypocritical and self-interested, but sometimes they can also be right.

It doesn’t look brave or democratic or comradely to refuse Burnham permission to be the Labour candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, but there was never any question of letting him stand.

The party leader has a majority on Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC), and the rules say that Labour mayors cannot be parliamentary candidates without permission from the NEC. The party leader does not want a dangerous rival in the House of Commons, and so Burnham will stay in Manchester. That is the reality of power.

Starmer’s only decision was to calculate the damage done by blocking Burnham – and he concluded that it was less than that of allowing the pretender to his throne to return to parliament.

An outcry of protest is already in mid-roar. It will be uncomfortable. There will be a lot of nonsense thundered about “leaving your best players on the bench”, about “control-freakery” and, most woundingly, about Starmer being so fearful that he dare not take on one of Labour’s few popular leaders in an open contest.

The prime minister need not worry about Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister who said that Burnham ought to be allowed to stand. She doesn’t want him in the Commons any more than Starmer does – Burnham would usurp her position as the leading candidate of the left.

Starmer will pay more attention to Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, who said yesterday: “I very much hope the local party will have the option of selecting Andy Burnham as the candidate.” His disloyalty will have been noted. He could just have been nice about Burnham and said he was one of the team, as Wes Streeting, the health secretary, did. But instead he stoked the party’s grassroots opposition to Starmer.

The reaction that matters most to Starmer is that of the wider parliamentary party. A straggly line of Labour MPs went public yesterday demanding justice for the Manchester One. Lucy Powell, the deputy leader and the only pro-Burnham vote on the NEC panel that decided his fate by eight votes to one, led the parade.

Rayner and Miliband followed, along with about a dozen other backbenchers. Several of them are members of the Socialist Campaign Group and therefore do not count, but Jo White of the Red Wall group and Connor Naismith of the Blue Labour group are serious voices on the centre ground.

The question for Starmer, though, is whether disappointing them hastens the day that 81 Labour MPs go public to nominate a challenger to his leadership. And his calculation is still that that day is further off if Burnham is not available as a candidate than if he is.

Fortunately, Starmer’s self-interest and the national interest coincide. The country’s problems will not be solved by the descent from the north of a semi-mythical figure. Some of Burnham’s supporters seize on superficial opinion-poll findings that suggest voters have a favourable view of him. Which they may do of him as mayor of Manchester, where he has done a good job and stood up for his patch. But he wasn’t popular as a minister, or as a candidate (twice) for the Labour leadership.

The only thing that Burnham would do differently as prime minister, as far as we can tell, would be to borrow more and spend more. That is not what the country needs.

Starmer is quite right to keep him outside the tent.