There’s an old joke in Westminster that goes as follows.

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A Blairite, a Brownite and a Corbynista walk into a bar. The barman says “what will it be, Mr Burnham?”. It may not be the most devastating of put-downs, but it does reveal an undeniable truth about Andy Burnham’s political career - namely, that he’s been prone to a remarkable amount of ideological shapeshifting over the years.

With his coronation as our next Prime Minister all but ensured, I’ve been struck by how little discussion there’s been around who Andy Burnham really is and what he really believes.

Is he the modernising Blairite who, while Health Secretary, became the only politician to ever privatise an NHS hospital? Is he a tribune of the soft left that he claimed to be while battling Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership in 2015? Or is he someone else entirely?

What seems undeniable is that Burnham has gone further than most politicians in cultivating........

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