So that’s that, then. Keir Starmer has read the room, found it on fire, and quietly let himself out of the back door.
Andy Burnham, the man who has spent years doing his best impression of a Prime Minister-in-waiting from a tram stop in Greater Manchester, is now the overwhelming favourite to be holding the keys to No.10. And the question I keep being asked, by founders who have built something real with their own sweat and overdraft, is a simple one: is he on our side or isn’t he?
I should declare an interest. I advised David Cameron’s government on enterprise, and I sat alongside the late, magnificent Lord Young of Graffham, the sharpest business brain to wander the corridors of Whitehall in a generation. Young understood something that most politicians never grasp, which is that you cannot conjure growth from a spreadsheet or a press release. You get it by listening to people who have actually met a payroll on a Friday when the bank has gone quiet. His reports on small business were not poetry, but they were honest, and they moved the needle. We need that voice in the room again.
Now, Burnham is not a fool, and he is not anti-business in the snarling, placard-waving sense. He talks a good game about “business-friendly socialism,” whatever that turns out to mean when the civil servants get hold of it. He wants to cut business rates for the corner café and the struggling pub, which is grand, and I will buy the first round. But the mood music among the people who actually create jobs is not exactly a standing ovation. A recent survey found that eight in ten SME owners are nervous about what a Burnham premiership means for their business, and you do not get a number like that by accident.
Here is the bit Burnham needs to understand, and understand fast. The genius of a healthy economy is not the wealth that gets created. It is what happens to that wealth afterwards. The founder who sells her software company for forty million does not stuff it under the mattress. She becomes an angel investor. She backs three more founders, mentors a dozen, and sets up a fund. That is the flywheel, and it is the single most powerful engine of prosperity we have. The Tony Blair Institute, no nest of swivel-eyed capitalists, has written about exactly this, the way start-up success recycles into the next generation of scale-ups. Nine out of ten angels reinvest their exit money. That is not greed. That is the machine working.
And here is my worry. You cannot, on the one hand, ask entrepreneurs to take insane risks, remortgage the house, miss the kids’ bedtimes for a decade, and then, on the other, signal that the moment they succeed you intend to relieve them of the reward through a wealth tax, a land tax, or whatever the focus group has christened it this week. Burnham has been artfully vague on this, which is its own kind of answer. Vagueness is what frightens founders. They can plan for bad news. They cannot plan for a shrug.
The thing is, the money is sitting there, ready to be put to work. The challenge for whoever is next PM is not creating start-up wealth. We are rather good at that, thank you. The challenge is getting it recycled into the real economy instead of fleeing to Lisbon and Dubai, where the welcome is warmer and the tax letters are kinder. That is a solvable problem, but only if Burnham does the one thing this government has been allergic to, which is actually listening to entrepreneurs about how to unlock the funding rather than lecturing them about fairness.
So can he win us over? Yes, he can, and I would rather like him to. But it requires a leap that does not come naturally to a man whose instincts were forged in the Labour movement. He needs a Lord Young of his own, a proper entrepreneur with calloused hands and scar tissue, sitting at the heart of Downing Street, not a special adviser who once read a book about disruption on the train to Manchester. He needs to treat founders not as a cash machine to be tapped but as the goose that lays the golden egg, and you do not, if you have any sense, threaten the goose.
Burnham has charisma, a northern soul, and a genuine knack for sounding like he means it. What he lacks, so far, is a credible promise to the wealth creators that their success will be celebrated rather than confiscated. Make that promise, and keep it, and he could be the most pleasant surprise this country has had in years. Break it, and the flywheel stops, the money leaves, and we are all the poorer for it. Over to you, Andy. The kettle is on.
