Andy burnham

When Andy Burnham attended London Pride, the Labour leadership hopeful proudly sported a t-shirt which read ‘never kissed a Tory’. While Mr S is yet to track down a Tory who found romance with Burnham, there are doubts that the same can be said for his wife, Marie-France van Heel. During Victoria Derbyshire’s Labour leadership hustings this morning, Burnham revealed his wife’s cross-party past: ‘My wife and I have been together for 25 years but in the early days she was on Blind Date and she was the picker, and to add insult to injury she picked Will from Surrey, who ended up being the director of communications for the Conservative party.’ However,

Throughout his career, Andy Burnham has been keen to point out that he is not one of the ‘metropolitan elite’. The Labour leadership hopeful says that ‘for too long there has been a sense of a metropolitan elite at the top of the Labour party’. So Mr S was curious to learn the venue for a talk he is giving next week. Burnham will appear at the Soho House private members’ club on Tuesday to read ‘a short story about equality and justice’. While Steerpike is sure Burnham’s words will be sincere, he worries that the venue – which is popular with Hugh Grant, Madonna and Kirsty Young – may distract from the message. To

The Houses of Parliament are falling down. According to the Independent Options Appraisal of the Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal Programme – a group of engineers and project managers commissioned to have a butcher’s – the Palace of Westminster is ‘partly sinking, contains asbestos and has outdated cabling’, is ‘infested with rats and mice and in an advanced state of disrepair’ and will take £5.7 billion and 32 years to put right, unless MPs and Lords shuffle off somewhere else for a bit, in which case it’ll be £3.5 billion over six years. Without such repairs, ‘major, irreversible damage’ looms. Several MPs have taken advantage of the report to suggest that

Liz Kendall is continuing to push herself as the ‘change everything’ candidate for the Labour leadership. During a speech at Reuters this morning, Kendall called for the party to make a big shift on fiscal responsibility if it has any hope of winning the next election — a task some think is beyond Labour in its current state: ‘If we continue to stick with the politics that we had at the last election or, indeed, over the last seven or eight years, we will get the same result. Einstein said the definition of madness was to continue doing the same thing over and over again and expect to get a different result. We need

Alan Milburn has told Labour something it does not want to hear: Tony Blair was as great for the party as Margaret Thatcher was for the Tories. At a breakfast with the Centre for Social Justice this morning, the former health secretary argued that  Labour ‘could not have got it more wrong’ at the last election and urged the party to snap out of its ‘self-delusion’ that New Labour and Blair were all bad: ‘Great leaders always have a big purpose. For Churchill it was victory in war, for Thatcher victory against a stifling state. For Blair it was victory against old-fashioned attitudes and institutions that held our country back. Today, to

Yvette Cooper addressed a lobby lunch today and put on an impressive performance. In contrast to her slightly wooden performance during last night’s debate, Cooper came across as straightforward and articulate — and surprisingly funny. She joked that alongside the ten meetings to sign off the Edstone, there were seven meetings for a ‘fiscally responsible water feature.’ She also told the gathered hacks ‘we want more Haribo!’ in reference to the sweet factory in her constituency. Unsurprisingly, Cooper spoke confidently on the economy, demonstrating her years of experience on the frontbench. On Greece, she argued that ‘the British government should be using its role within Europe to argue for the Eurozone taking

The first televised debate in the Labour leadership contest was a rather dull affair. None of the candidates shone and no one stumbled. Although there were a few moments of interest, everyone conformed to their stereotypes. Andy Burnham was brash and appeared too keen to speak over the other candidates. He spoke about the problems of the ‘Westminster elite’ and how Labour needs to break free from that mould — despite having worked in politics his whole career and even spending time as a special adviser before becoming an MP. Yvette Cooper was the best performer and gave a good response to the question on the welfare state, citing her

Thanks to a last minute rush of nominations, Jeremy Corbyn has made it onto the Labour leadership ballot paper. Corbyn had 30 MPs backing him at 11am this morning and it seems some undecideds and Team Burnham defectors were persuaded it would be a good thing to have Corbyn in the contest, taking him to the 35 names he needed. The MP for Islington North is now the most left-wing candidate to fight a Labour leadership election since Tony Benn ran against Neil Kinnock in 1988. But as you can see from the list of MPs nominating him below, many of those backing Corbyn are not his natural supporters. In fact some, such

Jeremy Corbyn is adding some unlikely excitement to the Labour leadership contest. Although he does not have enough MPs yet to make it onto the ballot paper — he needs another 16 nominations at the time of writing — there is still a sense he might make it into race. As I wrote earlier in the week, the other campaigns are open to ‘loaning’ Corbyn some of their nominations if he nearing the magic 35 threshold. Typically, Corbyn is sticking to his principles and has told Total Politics he is not keen on the idea of other candidates helping him: ‘I’m not particularly into charity nominations. I want to see a proper debate within the

Patrick Wintour is one of the best political editors around. For the Guardian he’s been for decades a cool and well-sourced voice: even-handed, informed, interesting but in the best sense dry. So when I heard he’d written the most comprehensive behind-the-scenes account yet of Labour’s failed general election campaign I hurried to read it. I was not disappointed. ‘The undoing of Ed Miliband, and how Labour lost the election’ is an insider account of a chapter of accidents, starting with Mr Miliband’s memory lapse about the deficit during Labour’s last party conference. Apparently he shut himself in his hotel room afterwards and wouldn’t come out. The story takes us through to