Burnham's speech was delivered by a leader who believes in himself - and more importantly, the rest of us too, writes Andrew Marr
The PM's speech, delivered at the party's Liverpool conference, was punchy, emotional and a coherent belter of a speech
A few moments earlier he had what actors would call a dry. He had ground to a halt, completely unable to keep speaking, and had to be revived by spontaneous applause.
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So how different was this really?
He had promised us he wouldn’t make the usual tub thumping kind of speech. It was a pity, frankly, that about a minute and a half after that, he made a pugnacious attack on Tori privatisation which had the entire hall on its feet cheering.
Never mind, there was no personal attack on Nigel Farage, no attempt to do down Kemi Badenoch or Zack Polanski. There was plenty of politics but very little political point scoring, almost no ra ra, hooray for us, aren’t the other lot awful? To that extent, it was very different.
There were big promises on council housing, the future of the water industry and above all a new national care service, to be funded by turning the triple lock on pensions into a less expensive double lock. That, in itself is a gigantic political gamble which scares some labour people witless.
But if you are looking for a glimpse of the future of politics in this country, I would encourage you to think about this.
I’m old enough to remember Neil Kinnock at his very best and Tony Blair, likewise - nd to my surprise, I have to report that Andy Burnham is at least as good a platform speaker as either of them, perhaps better. But I also think he’s a man with a political strategy.
We’ve been complaining about too much of the happy, smiley touchy-feely TikTok Videos, too much of the warm bath of Patriotic optimism, not enough hard edge, not enough running towards difficult arguments.
This evening we can’t say that any longer.
Burnham promised a new look at electoral reform. He promised a completely different offer to pensioners, calling politicians of his generation, including himself, too cowardly to try to fix today’s broken system of social care. And he suggested a much closer relationship with the EU, without necessarily going back in.
Those three positions - Voting reform, Europe and social care – coincidentally or not, lead you directly to the heart of today’s liberal Democrats and I can see some kind of future coalition politics written all over today’s speech. Basically,
The new Prime Minister believes he can unite the centre left and beat the right, transforming the direction and meaning of British politics. No, he may be right. He may be wrong.
But meanwhile, this was a punchy, emotional and coherent belter of a speech. There are lots of questions, of course there are. There always are.
But here is a real leader, who believes in himself and, more encouraging still, seems to believe in the rest of us too.
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Andrew Marr is an author, journalist and presenter for LBC.
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