As Andy Burnham, our new prime minister designate, reached the end of his victory speech, he made special mention of an 84-year-old sitting near the front of the audience. “He is the man that fired up a young Andy Burnham in the north-west of England in the mid-1980s with rhetoric of the kind that remains unmatched, I would say, in modern politics,” said Burnham, emotionally. “It has always been something that I treasure to get a message from him, with his advice and the care and the thought he puts into those messages. They mean everything to me. I would not be standing here, I would have not have joined this great party of ours in 1985, had it not been for the legend that is Neil Kinnock.”
No other Labour leader was mentioned. Not Blair, nor Attlee nor MacDonald, men who actually made it into No 10. Rather it was Kinnock, the nearly man, who was picked out.
It was not the first time Lord Kinnock of Bedwellty had stolen the show at an event to welcome a new Labour leader. But on that occasion, nearly 16 years ago, his hopes had been invested in a quite different candidate, Ed Miliband, not his rival Burnham.
It was Miliband who had won Kinnock’s endorsement, and the reason was clear, with Kinnock telling a fringe meeting after Miliband’s victory speech: “A trade union delegate leaned over and said ‘Neil, we’ve got our party back’. I thought that was so accurate.”
So with the elevation of Burnham has Neil Kinnock – after all the Blairite reforms of the 1990s and 2000s – gone one better than 2010 and got his party back, and in power?
Certainly there are similarities between the men. Both Burnham and Kinnock have displayed a penchant for transformations in their political careers.
Burnham has gone from a Blairite committed to working with markets to a new incarnation favouring nationalisation, bus regulation and council house building.
Kinnock in his time went from Eurosceptic to European Commissioner and from Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament supporter to multilateralist, though in the end none of it was enough to win the trust of the electorate.
He just needed patience. Now he is watching proudly as his protégé prepares to take office at the head of a 400-strong parliamentary Labour Party and committed to introducing the 21st century’s equivalence of socialism in our time.
As he listened in the front row, Kinnock would not have missed the obvious similarities of Burnham’s oratory and personal philosophy to those that defined his own first attempt to become prime minister in 1987, when his famous “Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to go to university?” speech became the centrepiece of Hugh Hudson’s now famous “Kinnock: The Movie” party election broadcast.
Burnham used recognisably Kinnockite language to describe what drives him in politics: “The kind of feeling that [areas where people grow up] should be more than they are. The feeling that kids shouldn’t have to leave those places, those proud places to get on in life.”
Kinnock is known to have harboured doubts about Tony Blair’s modernising reforms to the party after he took over in 1994, and his welcome of his trade union’s comrade’s declaration that “we have got our party back” says much about his disillusion with the last Labour government. Does he now see a final chance to see his political values at last transformed into policy by a government under Burnham?
Following Miliband’s defeat at the 2015 general election, Kinnock supported Burnham in the subsequent leadership election, which was won ultimately by Jeremy Corbyn.
And when Starmer ran into difficulties Kinnock was quick to champion Burnham’s audacious bid for power. He seemed to welcome Starmer’s humiliating resignation as Labour leader last month, stating that it had been caused by the prime minister’s “seriously bad judgments” – as public an endorsement of the King in the North as could be expected from a former party leader.
As a committed and energetic Remainer, he desperately wants to see Britain rejoin the EU and has argued that Britain should “not be constrained” by the red lines previously laid out by Starmer on an EU reset – no membership of the customs union or single market. Undoubtedly he has shared with Burnham his view that the “only patriotic thing” is for Britain to rejoin as a full EU member at some point.
From a 1987 schools general election debate in which a 17-year-old Burnham played the part of the then Labour leader (and won a landslide victory among fellow pupils) to prime minister-in-waiting with the expectations of a nation and a party on his shoulders, is Andy Burnham finally about to be the prime minister Neil Kinnock has been waiting for?
The noble Lord seems to think so.