Meanwhile, the £3.35 trillion question is ... will Andy Burnham appoint Ed Miliband as his chancellor of the exchequer?
Oddly, as one who has opined that Burnham needs to “think left but do right”, I rather hope he does.
It could go disastrously wrong, but it might be a success. Miliband – although very ideological* – is highly intelligent. His Net Zero agenda is indubitably the right thing (others will vehemently disagree). He would need to season it with a generous dose of reality, but a chancellor who thinks beyond the next opinion poll and the next election would make a refreshing change.
The commentariat suggest that Miliband being made chancellor is a strong possibility, but far from certain.
The bookies have him as hot favourite at around 4/6.
Next come Shabana Mahmood is at around 4/1, Wes Streeting at around 5/1, Yvette Cooper at around 13/2 and Pat McFadden at around 8/1. Of those I would favour McFadden. Dull but sensible.
(*I badly mistyped “ideological” – and the first word my spell-checker suggested was “diabolical”!)
Dull but sensible?
Just another Starmerite beneficiary of the Labour Together project /scam/criminal conspiracy to hoodwink the Labour voters.
Lies as readily as Starmer and Reed.
Pat McFadden picked up quite a few Brownie points from me and others when the Mandelson files revealed him complaining that every government meeting revolves around "who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others".
Meanwhile...
As I’ve observed before, it would be very surprising if Burnham’s team – and possibly Burnham himself – were not regular visitors to the UKP Politics Thread; and it’s clearly important that Burnham knows our position not only on who should be Chancellor (see above) but also who should be Foreign Secretary.
Here are the current bookies’ favourites, in order from Wes Streeting at 5/2 to Lisa Nandy and Keir Starmer at 10/1: Wes Streeting, David Miliband, Ed Miliband, John Healey, Angela Rayner, Shabana Mahmood, Jonathan Reynolds, Lisa Nandy and Keir Starmer.
Not an impressive list, when you consider that those who have held the post over the past 200 years have included such substantial figures as the Duke of Wellington, Viscount Palmerston, the Earl of Rosebery, Arthur Balfour, Ramsay MacDonald, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, “RAB” Butler, David Owen, John Major, Douglas Hurd, David Miliband and William Hague.
And, er, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and David Lammy.
You need someone with a certain amount of weight and gravitas. I’d go for David Miliband or John Healey.
(I seem to have become a bit of a cheerleader for the Miliband bros – although I have to admit that I’d clean forgotten until I did my googling that David Miliband has already been Foreign Secretary, for almost three years in 2007-10 under Gordon Brown.)
