Cast your mind back to just over a decade ago. Clive Lewis was a newly elected Labour backbencher and part of Jeremy Corbyn’s small band of parliamentary supporters; Andy Burnham was launching his second leadership campaign by pitching himself to Ed Miliband’s right. Any suggestion then that the pair could do a political deal might have prompted someone to ask how you were feeling.
But that’s the scenario being discussed after Lewis yesterday declared on the BBC’s Politics Live that he would be prepared to give up his Norwich South seat for Burnham. “Do you know what? If I’m going to sit here and say country before party, party before personal ambition, then yes, I have to say yes, don’t I?” he said.
Lewis, as he was for Corbyn before, has long been one of Burnham’s most outspoken advocates. He used his recent Robin Cook memorial lecture to cast the Manchester mayor as the heir to the party’s soft-left tradition and to endorse him as the next Labour leader (“I know he’s been on a journey because he’s told me so and you can see for yourselves”).
When we spoke, Lewis emphasised that he was answering a “hypothetical question” but added of Burnham: “It has to be someone with government experience, he’s got an alternative vision, a track record of delivery and is a household name, so ticks all the boxes.”
But for several reasons Burnham won’t be becoming “King of the Norfolk” (as one Labour source put it). It would draw him away from his north-west heartland – the home of his political reinvention – and is a dubious electoral prospect. Norwich, as one Socialist Campaign Group MP points out, is “under siege from the Greens”. The party finished second there in 2024 and, after its surge under Zack Polanski, is projected to come close to overturning Lewis’s 13,239 majority.
Starmer loyalists, as ever, dismiss any suggestion that Burnham could waltz his way through a National Executive Committee selection process. “It assumes the party machinery will just roll over and let things designed to destabilise the PM happen,” notes one. Leaving that aside, Burnham is not going to fight a highly competitive by-election that would see him labelled a “carpetbagger”.
Yet Lewis’s offer – “I appreciate the support,” said Burnham on Today this morning – shows how the stakes are rising in Labour’s shadow leadership contest. It is an implicit appeal for a north-west MP to step forward and relinquish their seat in order to give Burnham a chance of returning to parliament before next May’s elections – the moment of greatest potential danger for Starmer.
And that possibility is also concentrating minds among Burnham’s rivals for the soft-left crown. “They’re worried that if Andy gets into the [Parliamentary Labour Party] they couldn’t beat him, so the idea that he might find a seat is putting rocket boosters under the idea that Starmer needs to go sooner rather than later,” says one MP.
What is clear is that the briefing wars of last week have only amplified rather than diminished Labour’s leadership conversation.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: Is this the end of Labour?]
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