Sooner or later, the heady days of the early Andy Burnham bounce and summer of “money off now” remedies on bus fares, pub business tax caps and some energy bill VAT relief give way to more trying questions.

A refreshed government which has run so far on upbeat, can-do “vibes” must tackle a thorny subject where the political dopamine rewards are scanty and the risks of failure and backlash high – how to settle asylum seekers to ensure, as the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, puts it, that “no one type of community is bearing the brunt”.

This is code for anger the government aims to address about the housing of asylum seekers in poorer areas – including Mahmood’s own Birmingham Ladywood. The proposal is to disperse incomers in “mixed mode” accommodation – Whitehall-speak for a hodge-podge of old student apartments, multiple-occupancy homes and former army facilities – and move away from the reliance on cheap hotels, which has proved a flashpoint for anger in areas from Essex to Falkirk.

Burnham and Mahmood want to reframe arguments about asylum as being about fairness. Many Labour MPs in poorer areas have been pressing ministers to address dissatisfaction in poorer communities across the country, which take the lion’s share of asylum applicants – the gap between settlement in the most deprived areas and the least deprived is a ratio of around 5:1, fertile ground for the kind of aggressive outbursts seen in August in Thetford, Norfolk. That was in a poor part of the market town.

But middle-class dissatisfaction can also make its voice heard, and protests in the tiny village of Piddington showed up in a mock “independence referendum” over plans to house 1,000 asylum seekers at a disused MoD base. While the........

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