Andy Burnham is going on a “listening tour”, travelling the country on a bus to find out what real people are concerned about. I’ve heard commentators rationalise the idea in various ways: apparently it underscores the difference between him and his predecessor, who only ever relaxed when he was out of the country; what else is Burnham going to do in recess, with his cabinet already chosen – organise his Post-it notes?; he’s been out of politics a long time, and many people will be only dimly aware of who he is; his speeches to date have had a very urban focus, and particularly with farming being this season’s crisis sector, he needs to broaden his sphere of interest to take in rural areas. Truly, the prime ministerial honeymoon period is like a one-year-old’s birthday party – all you have to do is stand up and smile, for everyone to clap.
None of the rationalisations are in any way true: an in-person focus group, where you journey to discover a range of concerns you could figure out for yourself with one report from the Institute for Public Policy Research and half a brain, is exactly the kind of thing Starmer would have done, if he’d thought of it. There’s quite a bit to be getting on with, between now and September, since autumn’s looming crises – food shortages, energy price hikes due to the ongoing war in Iran – are plain, and there’s no better time to plan than when you don’t have the leader of the opposition yanking your chain. Burnham actually has tremendous household-level recognition, thanks to a combination of hinterland and eyelashes, as evidenced by the fact that even when contesting Makerfield he got mobbed every time he got out of a car. Now, the conditions devastating farmers, being the direct result of climate crisis, would be better addressed by a long-range strategy on the transition to renewables, not a chinwag.
I’ll meet the road show halfway, though, and accept that the thinking behind it is buried deeper in the squishy collective subconscious than the “marketing strategy for mid-sized building society” strata. This is the living definition of “peripatetic”, an adjective usually attached to kings. Medieval kings travelled around the country in order to collect their taxes by literally eating them from one noble estate to the next. Tax hikes could be exacted by simply adding to your entourage and eating more. King John’s train stretched two miles, bulked up by the mercenaries required to protect the pampered non-warrior class from rebel barons who were sick of having their food eaten. In a pesky feedback loop, the larger your entourage, the more you all ate, the more annoyed the aristocracy became, the more mercenaries you needed and the larger your entourage.
Burnham could be forgiven for thinking he’s more than a match for this death spiral, having the lessons of history right there, but can we forgive him for the emotional leap that put him on his tour bus? His first question seems to have been not “What would the leader of a mature democracy in an embattled period do?” but “What would be the first move of the King of the North?” His kingly role models must all come from the dawn of monarchy, since by the time you get to Henry VIII, he’s only really travelling to escape sewage overflow from his last great palace. But then “King of the North” has always had a very medieval overtone. A sign of the early modern period’s growing governmental sophistication was its ability to distinguish one bit of the north from another.
It is endearing, if also nerve-racking and painful, to consider the faith underpinning this self-fashioning – that leadership is an innate quality more important than sequential thought and planning, and that if the stars light upon a leader who can connect with his people, the nation will come together, good decisions will be made, and the rest is detail. One can but hope that’s the limit of the wishful thinking, and he’s not also banking on some dragons.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
