Isabel Hardman

Voters in Makerfield haven’t even gone to the polling stations, but already the Labour leadership contest is well into a detailed exposition of what Andy Burnham – rather than any of the other contenders – might do. A few ‘star’ new MPs had been promoted straight into government, but the rest hadn’t had an invite to Downing Street Defence spending, welfare cuts, social care, immigration and the EU are all matters Burnham has pronounced on – and then changed his stance. The problem with WWAD (What Would Andy Do?), as the bracelets for Labour’s messiah might read, is that the answer really depends on the weather.

‘Corridor care’ should be an oxymoron, but is instead such a feature of the NHS now that nearly 3,000 people a day found themselves being treated in corridors, cupboards or even car parks last month. New figures show that 2,241 patients a day on average who had corridor care while in A&E, with a further 669 being cared for in cupboards, toilets and car parks. These are the latest official figures which show how the NHS isn’t working – but earlier in the week the Royal College of Emergency Medicine came up with its own estimate of how many people were dying unnecessarily as a result of long A&E waits: 1,300 a month.

Keir Starmer is using this morning’s cabinet meeting to underline the message he has been sending to more junior ministers over the past few days: he’s not going without a fight. Part of his argument is that he’s got loads to do, which must come as a surprise to anyone who read the King’s Speech. One of the big things Starmer wants to show his party he can do is address the hot-button issue of children’s access to social media, first with his threat to tech firms yesterday that they have three months to stop children being able to send or see explicit content.

Andy Burnham finally confirmed last night that he is indeed standing for the Labour leadership – just in case anyone was confused about what the Mayor of Greater Manchester is up to as he stands in the Makerfield by-election. Speaking on BBC Question Time, Burnham said: I'm not somebody who gets ahead of myself. I can't do anything unless I'm lucky enough to get the support of people here. But if I get your support, I would seek to represent you at the highest possible level and give this constituency maximum power and influence. I think Wes Streeting seems to have launched a leadership contest, so if that is running, I would seek to join it.

We have now reached the stage of political debate around Henry Nowak’s murder where politicians are talking more about tone policing than they are about actual policing. Keir Starmer has today condemned Elon Musk for ‘interfering in our politics in the last few days, trying to whip up division – that’s not who we are in Britain’. He added that: ‘When we have a terrible case like Henry’s case, Henry Nowak, we react calmly, as his family have done.’ It is important for politicians to push back against attempts to create further division in society: part of the role of a political leader is to lead on the standard of debate, as well as the content.

Kemi Badenoch clearly decided that it would be difficult to call for calm around the Henry Nowak case, and then to spend Prime Minister’s Questions talking about it at length. The format of the session rarely lends itself to calm, and she had rightly judged that others – including Nigel Farage – would bring the matter up themselves. Instead, the Tory leader did what Keir Starmer did when he answered his first question, which was to call for calm. And then she moved onto welfare spending, using Pat McFadden’s private message to Lord Mandelson as an opportunity to revisit Labour’s failure to reform benefits. But Nowak still dominated the session, and not just in the questions.

It’s refreshing that social care has become a topic over which the putative Labour leadership contenders are prepared to scrap, given how neglected it has been for decades now. Both Andy. Burnham and Wes Streeting want to argue that they would be the leader who would take the radical step of legislating for a National Care Service – something Burnham first proposed back in 2009, just to give you an idea of how long it is taking for anyone to do anything meaningful on this matter. The babies born in the year Burnham unveiled his green paper on adult social care can now drive cars, but they still have no prospect of their grandparents, or indeed parents, being able to access a care system that actually works and is funded properly.

Like the rest of the King’s Speech, Keir Starmer’s address on the government’s legislative agenda had been prepared long before the turmoil in his party, and therefore bore little resemblance to reality. The Prime Minister did make a few joking references in his opening lines about the list of people endorsing Naz Shah’s book – adding that it was finally a list that everyone could get behind. But he largely spoke as though he were not hours away from a potential leadership challenge – or as though there were sections even of this speech that his own party wasn’t fully on board with.

All three of the resignation letters from ministers who have quit government in the past couple of hours will be painful for Keir Starmer, but Jess Phillips’s will hurt the most. The Safeguarding Minister makes a series of accusations against the Prime Minister which he will find personally hard to take. They cut right to the heart of why his premiership has failed. She describes him as a ‘good man fundamentally, who cares about the right things’, with the inevitable criticism following straight after: ‘however I have seen first-hand how that is not enough’.

Keir Starmer’s big survival speech could never be big enough to save him as Prime Minister. Whether he ends up getting the push now or later in the year has very little to do with what Starmer said today – he has been cooked for a while. But if this really had been the make-or-break speech that it has been billed as, it wouldn’t have worked, either. It largely served to highlight Starmer’s weaknesses further. Starmer really didn’t have much analysis bearing out his claim he had ‘learned a lot in the first two years in the job’ of Prime Minister It wasn’t just that he filled the speech with meaningless phrases such as ‘delivery is of course essential, but it’s not sufficient on its own to address the frustration voters feel’.