Burnham would be a fool to squander his massive majority with an early election

Does Andy Burnham lie awake in the flat above No 10 and regret his own words? Not his seemingly unguarded remarks about Manchester City’s cheating charges or his thoughtless, almost throw-away comments about a second independence referendum in Scotland. He can always rely on his staff to “clarify” such carelessness whenever necessary. But does he ever regret making promises that, with hindsight, he never intended to honour? The vow to his future voters in Makerfield not to re-open the arguments over Brexit is a fine example of the Prime Minister’s tendency to say what he thinks an audience wants to hear without considering whether such promises might land him in trouble in the future. Now that he has declared himself open to the return of EU freedom of movement and is actively considering a fresh application for full EU membership, does he not consider his previous assurances to be inconvenient at the very least? He may soon have even greater reasons to regret assuring the country that there will be no early general election , and that the next polling day on which we can choose our MPs will be in 2029. Prime ministers are free to change their minds, of course, and if Burnham, having assessed recent opinion polls giving Labour an eight-point lead, decided to call an election for later this year or early in 2027, any criticism of his fickle nature would be lost amid the tumult of the national hustings. Fears that an early election is coming have been fuelled by the expectation that Chancellor John Healey’s Budget on Wednesday will be low-key (presumably to save big policies for a coming manifesto). But as The Telegraph has reported , City economists say Burnham risks triggering a spike in borrowing costs if he does call a snap poll this year or early next. Two vivid examples of prime ministerial misjudgments on the timing of general elections should loom large as Burnham and his advisers consider their options. The first is one with which Burnham was closely involved: the election that never was in 2007. Gordon Brown , newly installed as prime minister, gave orders to his party to prepare for an autumn election to win the personal mandate he felt he lacked after inheriting the 60-seat majority of his predecessor, Tony Blair . A million pounds was spent by the party on billboard space and the printing of leaflets, only for Brown to get cold feet following a surprisingly successful Conservative conference. He subsequently told the media that he had never even considered an early election, leading to David Cameron’s ruthlessly effective barb at the despatch box that he was the first prime minister to avoid an early election because he was worried he might win it. Labour lost its opinion poll lead in those frenetic days and didn’t recover it until after it had returned to opposition. The second more recent example of prime ministerial hubris is, of course, Theresa May . And that particular Shakespearean tragedy may contain an even more relevant lesson for Burnham. Convinced by her own extraordinary opinion poll lead and encouraged by Labour’s continuing division over its controversial and unpopular leader, Jeremy Corbyn , she called a snap election, ostensibly to secure a large enough majority to negotiate Brexit from a position of strength. With hindsight we know that May effectively united a divided Labour Party behind a leader who, outside Parliament, was one of the most effective grass-roots campaigners the party had ever produced. At the same time she revealed herself to be a liability on the campaign trail. What voters previously assumed was an admirable strain of steel in her backbone was in fact a cold inflexibility that didn’t resonate with ordinary voters’ concerns. The slim majority she had inherited from David Cameron was lost and May was fatally wounded. At the moment, Burnham is in a position of considerable strength, having rescued his party from the doldrums into which Keir Starmer had taken it. But like Brown, he recognises that an early election, even one that Labour wins, can only result in a smaller majority – and in Burnham’s case, a significantly smaller one. It would mean having to say goodbye to 50, 60 or even 70 parliamentary colleagues, all the while knowing that an additional three years of parliamentary career was unnecessarily denied them. The Prime Minister might also want to consider the Badenoch factor . The Conservative leader still out-polls her party, which in a general election is hardly an advantage. But if the public, during a long campaign, see enough of her “straight talking, common sense” interactions with voters, they might well feel the urge to give her party some sympathetic consideration, especially if some of the shine has by then come off Burnham’s vibes-heavy Gogglebox strategy. There is one other election Burnham might want to learn lessons from, but it’s not a UK one. In 1988, the Democrat challenger for the US presidency, Michael Dukakis, was scuppered by a cynical tactic by George Bush’s campaign to tar the Massachusetts governor with the crimes of a black felon called Willie Horton, who had been furloughed by Dukakis’s administration only to commit a rape and an assault while out of prison. Elections can throw up all sorts of unexpected events with unpredictable consequences. With immigration still near the top of voters’ political priorities (unlike in most previous elections), who’s to say what stories social media as well as more mainstream media will highlight? And there are, tragically, plenty of cases of sexual and violent assault against British victims by undocumented men who have arrived on our shores illegally and who have been put in various types of accommodation across the country at public expense. General election campaigns are hardly the time to conduct a moderate, calm public debate about the causes of such assaults and what can be done to prevent them. Which is why they would pose such a challenge to a government seeking to be re-elected while defending its record on asylum and immigration. High-risk political strategies become more attractive when a government’s space for manoeuvre becomes more restricted and time is running out. Neither of those factors apply to this Labour government. Burnham has a massive, impregnable majority at his disposal. He wields power and authority most of his predecessors would envy. Rolling the dice on an early election would be a gamble too far, and one that could well spell disaster for the PM and his party.