Heads Turn After Burnham’s Success, Prime Minister’s Troubles and Sunak’s Brazen U-Turn | Political news

Just when you think you understand British politics, you re-learn the lesson that you can’t write ground rules about how it works in practice.

I’m afraid there is no algorithm that the policy works with that does not ultimately fail.

Thursday, Chancellor Rishi Sunak did nothing less than a complete, cheeky U-turn on his career-defining flagship coronavirus work support policy.

Three weeks ago, he had wanted a dramatically cheaper form of job support package to help companies in the COVID-19 crisis.

It is likely to mean many job losses and result in a government-led effort to get people to switch to more viable careers.

Treasury advisers were blunt about the central political calculus: They were betting that the mere corporate expense of hiring new staff in better times would deter them from letting people go immediately in large numbers.

But Sunak has now admitted that he was wrong about this and reduced the amount that companies must pay to employ people who are unable to work and instead provided more government subsidies.

He is happy to say that he changed his mind.

It uses the excuse that we now know the trajectory of the virus in an unpredictable way less than a month ago.

This is not really true.

Inconveniently, the prime minister’s allies Boris johnson predicted the chancellor’s U-turn as early as the day after the original, cheaper version of the scheme was announced in late September.

However, the chancellor has opened his checkbook at a cost of billions to receive cheers from his own banks in the House of Commons.

Such a U-turn may well have killed Gordon Brown’s hopes of a higher office when he was chancellor.

George Osborne was almost transferred to the Foreign Office for less.

Yet for his part, and even reluctantly among political opponents, Sunak comes out relatively unscathed as the man who finally did the right thing.

Its survival is due to the fact that its political capital is still very high; You can afford to spend it on a massive U-turn because you have a lot of political capital in the first place.

Besides, this situation is itself a huge black mark for Labor, who have tried and failed to blame the Chancellor, but have not been able to find a weak point.

The political heat this week falls instead on the prime minister.

Everyone in the country now knows that the talks between Downing Street and Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, collapsed on Tuesday by a difference of £ 5 million, a rounding error in government finances.

Once again, in this fight, between the “King of the North” and the man who demolished Labor’s Red Wall, there are more gravity-defying political realities to marvel at.

In the hyperbole of the past few days, he’s missing the fact that Burnham probably missed every move in the last fortnight.

He was asking for a policy that he could never have insured, and in the process he gambled on the livelihoods of Greater Manchester residents.

In the end, he was lucky with his opponent and the bet seems to have paid off.

All of this was possible because, like Mr. Sunak, Mr. Burnham has also developed his political stock.

The mayor of Manchester Underground advocated a policy the government could never concede: a local increase in the salary of graduates from 67% to 80%.

Desirable as it was, this was always politically impossible to achieve.

The idea that it could engineer a regional salary increase for its residents that would then not trigger similar demands from every other electoral district in the country was a fallacy.

Burnham was explicit that he wanted more effective for people elsewhere, not just those represented by him, repeatedly stating that he was fighting for everyone who was about to enter Level 3 restrictions.

It was bold. Some in the government saw arrogance here. Mr. Burnham is not the Chancellor. The government could not allow this.

The gamble he made was huge, and when he didn’t get his way, he turned it into a virtue.

When he gave his press conference on the steps of Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, he (famously) did not know if the 60 million pounds offered by the government would be withdrawn from Manchester residents because negotiations with the government had collapsed.

Manchester people could have lost their tactic. But that was not the case, as Johnson made clear the next day.

A no-deal gamble that worked for the mayor more than the prime minister.

Burnham also slipped into his arguments. At one point, the problem was Mr. Sunak, then it wasn’t the size of the check.

There is a good reason for this; The entire time he sat atop a coalition of 10 local authority leaders, each of whom had different views on how the coronavirus should be managed.

Sir Richard Leese, the leader of the Manchester City Council, even advocated for a form of protection that would find favor with many conservatives who dislike some of the COVID-19 restrictions.

Probably some of that confusion was necessary to keep his local coalition together.

Yet in the eyes of many MPs, including some conservatives, it appears that Burnham has emerged victorious.

Wearing a threadbare but authentic outfit, clothes being more than words one of his most important political acts of the last fortnight, time and again he articulated a desire to be heard felt by all those residents of his who are confused by nonsense. contradictions in coronavirus policy.

His argument transcended the details, in a positively Borisonian way. People identified with him, a lesson that has long been key to Johnson’s success.

Both men know that it is not the details that matter. And, by having this fight, Downing Street has created a more formidable opponent with its own national platform than the one that existed two weeks ago.

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The third and final wonder of this week is that many in Westminster regard Burnham’s success as a Johnson loss.

The broad regional approach to the coronavirus has the Chancellor’s fingerprints all over it.

The license replacement that Mr. Burnham attacked was written by the Treasury.

The amount of money for the local council negotiations was provided by Number 11. The conditions for not allowing a de facto increase in wage support to 80% was a red line from the Treasury.

However, by handing over the cash to Downing Street, and allowing Johnson’s aide Sir Edward Lister to “move on”, it all turned into the prime minister’s political headache. Tax tactical genius.

Critically, Sunak’s fund was large enough to give Greater Manchester the additional £ 5 million that would have kept the talks alive.

Therefore, the collapse of this week’s negotiations cannot legitimately be put on Mr. Sunak’s door. Despite all of the above.

No wonder heads are spinning in Whitehall.

Three notable political events this week. It looks like the last seven days will shape the next few months.