That peculiar time of year, the political silly season, is nearly at a close. And, to be fair, we’ve had a good one.
We’ve watched the spectacle of a completely pointless by-election demonstrate just how popular a bloke dressed up as a bin can be. We’ve seen Angela Rayner get a hard time about earning nearly £90,000 in speaking engagements when she clearly said that MPs must never have second jobs. (She still hasn’t figured out that being the Housing Secretary is, in fact, a first job, and being a constituency MP comes a very distant second.) We’ve seen the new education secretary say that the reason we have such high youth unemployment is because, as a country, we are doing far too well with qualifications in English and Maths.
We’ve had a few proper announcements.
The government has announced they will build 70,000 social and affordable homes over the next 10 years. And Andy Burnham seems to have U-turned on taking over Thames Water into a special administrative vehicle, effectively re-nationalising it.
Importantly, though, since Parliament broke up for the summer recess, we have had a new prime minister.
Andy Burnham has been out and about, meeting people, heading off to Kiev, talking about problems, and doing some good stuff on the media.
But next week, our new prime minister will, for the very first time, face proper parliamentary scrutiny. When Parliament goes back on the 1st September, we will no doubt see a statement on the Kiev trip. There will be a host of urgent questions, a plethora of statements, and a phalanx of MPs from across the House eager to quiz the new government and new PM on everything that has happened.
For the first time in nearly a decade, Burnham will have to face the reality of being a prime minister. And he will discover it is nothing like being a mayor. He will have to keep his 403 colleagues happy if he wants to keep his job. He will discover that all the easy decisions will have been made already: he gets to decide all the unpopular ones. He will be unable to blame anyone else for problems. And he will discover that a short term bounce in the opinion polls may not be as long lived as he hoped.
It will be tough few months as he settles in. And he will need more than nice eyelashes and dark T-shirts to keep his popularity.
