This is Armchair Economics with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Armchair Economics with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

In politics, it’s the personalities that grab the headlines, and never more so when a new prime minister is about to take charge. In economics, it’s the numbers that matter: what’s happening to inflation, to unemployment, to interest rates, and most especially to growth.

The next few weeks will be full of stories about what Makerfield MP Andy Burnham says when he gets the job, his ability to empathise with voters, who he appoints to the various posts and so on.

But what will determine his success, or otherwise, is what happens to the economy. So what do we know about his ideas on that?

Quite a lot, actually. He believes in active big-state government – to spend more on infrastructure, believing that public investment can drive growth – but a government that does this in a business-friendly way. It is what he has done in Manchester and his instinct will be to roll that out across the country.

He has already got three interesting and important external advisers. One is another Mancunian, Lord Jim O’Neill, former chief economist at Goldman Sachs. He is best known for coining the acronym the Brics, standing for Brazil, Russia, India, and China, four of the largest emerging economies, and the Brics have now become a group of 10 countries acting as a counterbalance to the G7 developed nations. There’s Andy Haldane, a former Bank of England chief economist, who presciently warned in 2021 that inflation might be “a tiger by the tail” and race upwards, which it then did. And there’s Richard Hughes, who was a highly-regarded head of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), but........

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