Burnham's job is to shape the future. So why can't he stop litigating Britain's past?

He also offered a blunt diagnosis. From the 1980s onwards, he argued, political power was centralised, economic power privatised, the country deindustrialised, austerity hollowed out local government and Brexit compounded the damage.

There is truth in parts of that account. But a government elected to shape the future can become consumed by prosecuting the past. As Winston Churchill warned in 1940: “If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.” That is good advice for Burnham now.

The Prime Minister has set himself an almost impossible programme. We need our politicians to think ambitiously about what Britain can become, but ambition also requires choices. My own working life taught me the discipline of the possible: understand where you can make the greatest difference, concentrate your resources behind it and accept that choosing what to do also means choosing what not to do.

I first learnt that discipline at Goldman Sachs, where the market delivered a harsh but valuable education. As a trader, you must constantly decide which risks are worth taking and change course when the facts change. A trading position does not improve because one explains why it ought to have worked. Being wrong is survivable; staying wrong to protect one’s pride can be ruinous. The next decision matters more than vindicating the last one.

Success, however, expands confidence faster than judgement. I learnt that through a highly public failure - the loss of EMI. We saw real value in its extraordinary music catalogue, but conviction, leverage and timing left too little room when the financial crisis struck. There is an important difference between being right about the long-term value of an asset and having made the right decision to buy it on the terms, and at the time, that you did. I was slow to accept that and spent too long afterwards trying to vindicate the past at the expense of building the future.

The experience taught me that looking back is useful only if it helps you decide what to do next. You must understand what went wrong, be honest about the mistakes that were made and learn from them. But there comes a point when continuing to argue about the past gets in the way of building the future. Moving on can feel like surrender; sometimes it is the most disciplined allocation of our remaining time.

Government, like business, has finite capital, finite management resources and finite time. Burnham should therefore resist making the reversal of forty years of history the organising principle of his government. No government has the capacity to correct every accumulated grievance simultaneously. Instead, his government must draw lessons from those forty years and use them to decide where it can make the greatest difference now.

Looking forward also means judging policies by whether they will actually work, rather than rejecting them because of who introduced them or the political label attached to them. Public ownership, private ownership, central direction and local control are tools, not ends in themselves. What matters is whether they deliver lower costs, better services, stronger investment and wider opportunity - not whether they fit neatly within a particular political ideology.

There was much in the Prime Minister’s speech that was sensible. He promised to build on what had worked and emphasised devolution, technical education, infrastructure and the agency of communities. That is practical politics. The test should be where the government can make the greatest difference, not how many problems it can identify.

Mr Burnham should choose two or three priorities - perhaps energy, housing, infrastructure - publish clear measures of success and pursue them relentlessly. Trying to transform everything at once is usually a recipe for transforming very little.

A Prime Minister’s duty is to decide what can be done now and do it. Mr Burnham should move on quickly from the quarrels of the past and turn to the work ahead. Otherwise, he may be remembered for explaining Britain’s decline rather than reversing it.

____________________

Guy Hands is the Founder of private equity firm Terra Firma.

LBC Opinion provides a platform for diverse opinions on current affairs and matters of public interest.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official LBC position.

To contact us email opinion@lbc.co.uk