This time last year, it looked like he’d blown it.
After launching a broadside against Sir Keir Starmer’s government, Andy Burnham spent the 2025 Labour conference gradually retreating in the face of criticism from across the party.
The consensus was that he had gone too far too fast, catastrophically misjudging the mood and inadvertently shoring up support for Starmer.
Few people would have predicted then where he would be this year: sitting in the leader’s seat on the stage at the Liverpool Experience Campus.
The soft coup worked out, eventually. And this is Burnham’s prize – a conference in the city where he spent his formative years, flooded with positivity for the work he’s done improving Labour’s fortunes.
It’s little wonder he has a genuine, broad grin fixed to his face every time he makes an appearance somewhere on the campus.
Plastered on every surface are two words: hope again. That’s the slogan for this year, and it’s hard to read it as anything other than a rebuke of the ‘difficult choices’ rhetoric under Starmer.
In contrast, Burnham prefers to focus on the prize of a better country if he pulls off everything he’s planning.
That optimism was on full display for his interview with Laura Kuenssberg this morning, most notably in his radical plans to introduce an NHS-style system for social care in England.
He believes that by the time of the next general election, his government will have developed a workable plan and sold it well enough to the public that it can safely be placed at the heart of Labour’s manifesto.
More details will be sketched out when he steps up to the lectern for his high-stakes first conference speech as party leader on Tuesday.
It didn’t take long for the realities of politics to muddy things up, with shadow home secretary Chris Philp heavily hinting the Tories would not support the nascent plans and Reform’s Robert Jenrick resurrecting the ‘death tax’ and ‘dementia tax’ jibes that were used against previous efforts.
And that’s where we come to the other, more subtle meaning for the ‘hope again’ slogan.
All the party members in Liverpool over the next few days will be desperately hoping Burnham is able to pull off the many pledges he has made since coming to power.
That means social care, but it also means ending rough sleeping; building council houses; pulling off radical devolution; meeting targets for defence spending; and all the rest.
The ‘Burnham bounce’ in Labour’s poll results since July has come off the back of this change in style, and the long list of priorities the new PM has set out.
For the attendees at this year’s conference, it doesn’t bear thinking about what might happen to the public’s faith in the party and politics more broadly if all those bold plans crumble to dust.
Today, nobody cares that Burnham’s efforts to weaken Starmer at last year’s conference ended in humiliating failure. The matter was moot within a few months.
But if the new PM blows the opportunity he has now, it will be a very different story.
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