Burnham Allies Accuse Streeting of “Sabotage”
The Times leads Monday on Burnham’s allies formally accusing former Health Secretary Wes Streeting of “sabotage”, telling the paper that his Saturday call to rejoin the EU reopens Labour’s Brexit battles and plays directly into Reform UK’s hands ahead of the Makerfield by-election. One Burnham ally is quoted: “Wes’s only hope at becoming the next leader is for Andy to lose the by-election.” A cabinet minister tells the paper that the public battle between Streeting and Burnham as frontrunners is, paradoxically, making Sir Keir Starmer look like an “island of stability and sanity”.
A source close to Streeting said in an interview that his stance is uncontroversial because Burnham himself backed rejoining at last year’s Labour conference. The Streeting camp is unrepentant: an ally said in an interview on Sunday that “there is no point in trying not to upset anybody, that’s what got us into this problem”, framing the willingness to upset voters as the actual diagnostic test for the next leadership. The Streeting-Burnham mutual sabotage dynamic is the structural feature of the next several weeks: each candidate has a stronger short-term interest in damaging the other than in either accelerating or delaying a leadership contest. Number 10 will exploit this gap.